“I'll be only too glad to explain,” said Goward, “if you will only listen.”
“In my own judgment the best solution of the tangle would be for you to elope with a third party at your earliest convenience,” I continued, “but inasmuch as you have come here it is evident that you mean to pursue some course of action in respect to one of the two ladies—my sister or my aunt. Now what IS that course? and which of the two ladies may we regard as the real object of your vagrom affections? I tell you frankly, before you begin, that I shall permit no trifling with Peggy. As to Aunt Elizabeth, she is quite able to take care of herself.”
“It's—it's Peggy, of course,” said Goward. “I admire Miss Elizabeth Talbert very much indeed, but I never really thought of—being seriously engaged to her.”
“Ah!” said I, icily. “And did you think of being frivolously engaged to her?”
“I not only thought of it,” said Goward, “but I was. It was at the Abercrombies', Mr. Price. Lily—that is to say, Aunt Elizabeth—”
“Excuse me, Mr. Goward,” I interrupted. “As yet the lady is not your Aunt Elizabeth, and the way things look now I have my doubts if she ever is your Aunt Elizabeth.”
“Miss Talbert, then,” said Goward, with a heart-rending sigh. “Miss Talbert and I were guests at the Abercrombies' last October—maybe she's told you—and on Hallowe'en we had a party—apple-bobbing and the mirror trick and all that, and somehow or other Miss Talbert and I were thrown together a great deal, and before I really knew how, or why, we—well, we became engaged for—for the week, anyhow.”
“I see,” said I, dryly. “You played the farce for a limited engagement.”
“We joked about it a great deal, and I—well, I got into the spirit of it—one must at house-parties, you know,” said Goward, deprecatingly.
“I suppose so,” said I.
“I got into the spirit of it, and Miss Talbert christened me Young Lochinvar, Junior,” Goward went on, “and I did my best to live up to the title. Then at the end of the week I was suddenly called home, and I didn't have any chance to see Miss Talbert alone before leaving, and—well, the engagement wasn't broken off. That's all. I never saw her again until I came here to meet the family. I didn't know she was Peggy's aunt.”
“So that in reality you WERE engaged to both Peggy and Miss Talbert at the same time,” I suggested. “That much seems to be admitted.”
“I suppose so,” groaned Goward. “But not seriously engaged, Mr. Price. I didn't suppose she would think it was serious—just a lark—but when she appeared that night and fixed me with her eye I suddenly realized what had happened.”
“It was another case of 'the woman tempted me and I did eat,' was it, Goward?” I asked.
Goward's pale face Hushed, and he turned angrily.
“I haven't said anything of the sort,” he retorted. “Of all the unmanly, sneaking excuses that ever were offered for wrong-doing, that first of Adam's has never been beaten.”
“You evidently don't think that Adam was a gentleman,” I put in, with a feeling of relief at the boy's attitude toward my suggestion.
“Not according to my standards,” he said, with warmth.
“Well,” I ventured, “he hadn't had many opportunities, Adam hadn't. His outlook was rather provincial, and his associations not broadening. You wouldn't have been much better yourself brought up in a zoo. Nevertheless, I don't think myself that he toed the mark as straight as he might have.”
“He was a coward,” said Goward, with a positiveness born of conviction. And with that remark Goward took his place in my affections. Whatever the degree of his seeming offence, he was at least a gentleman himself, and his unwillingness to place any part of the blame for his conduct upon Aunt Elizabeth showed me that he was not a cad, and I began to feel pretty confident that some reasonable way out of our troubles was looming into sight.
“How old are you, Goward?” I asked.
“Twenty-one,” he answered, “counting the years. If you count the last week by the awful hours it has contained I am older than Methuselah.”
At last I thought I had it, and a feeling of wrath against Aunt Elizabeth began to surge up within me. It was another case of that intolerable “only a boy” habit that so many women of uncertain age and character, married and single, seem nowadays to find so much pleasure in. We find it too often in our complex modern society, and I am not sure that it is not responsible for more deviations from the path of rectitude than even the offenders themselves imagine. Callow youth just from college is susceptible to many kinds of flattery, and at the age of adolescence the appeal which lovely woman makes to inexperience is irresistible.
I know whereof I speak, for I have been there myself. I always tell Maria everything that I conveniently can—it is not well for a man to have secrets from his wife—and when I occasionally refer to my past flames I find myself often growing more than pridefully loquacious over my early affairs of the heart, but when I thought of the serious study that I once made in my twentieth year of the dozen easiest, most painless methods of committing suicide because Miss Mehitabel Flanders, aetat thirty-eight, whom I had chosen for my life's companion, had announced her intention of marrying old Colonel Barrington—one of the wisest matches ever as I see it now—I drew the line at letting Maria into that particular secret of my career. Miss Mehitabel was indeed a beautiful woman, and she took a very deep and possibly maternal interest in callow youth. She invited confidence and managed in many ways to make a strong appeal to youthful affections, but I don't think she was always careful to draw the line nicely between maternal love and that other which is neither maternal, fraternal, paternal, nor even filial. To my eye she was no older than I, and to my way of thinking nothing could have been more eminently fitting than that we should walk the Primrose Way hand in hand forever.
While I will not say that the fair Mehitabel trifled with my young affections, I will say that she let me believe—nay, induced me to believe by her manner—that even as I regarded her she regarded me, and when at the end she disclaimed any intention to smash my heart into the myriad atoms into which it flew—which have since most happily reunited upon Maria—and asserted that she had let me play in the rose-garden of my exuberant fancy because I was “only a boy,” my bump upon the hard world of fact was an atrociously hard one. Some women pour passer le temps find pleasure in playing thus with young hopes and hearts as carelessly as though they were mere tennis-balls, to be whacked about and rallied, and volleyed hither and yon, without regard to their constituent ingredients, and then when trouble comes, and a catastrophe is imminent, the refuge of “only a boy” is sought as though it really afforded a sufficient protection against “responsibility.” The most of us would regard the hopeless infatuation of a young girl committed to our care, either as parents or as guardians, for a middle-aged man of the world with such horror that drastic steps would be taken to stop it, but we are not so careful of the love-affairs of our sons, and view with complaisance their devotion to some blessed damozel of uncertain age, comforting ourselves with the reflection that he is “only a boy” and will outgrow it all in good time. (There's another mem. for my legislative career—a Bill for the Protection of Boys, and the Suppression of Old Maids Who Don't Mean Anything By It.)
I don't mean, in saying all this, to reflect in any way upon the many helpful friendships that exist between youngsters developing into manhood and their elders among women who are not related to them. There have been thousands of such friendships, no doubt, that have worked for the upbuilding of character; for the inspiring in the unfolding consciousness of what life means in the young boy's being of a deeper, more lasting, respect for womanhood than would have been attained to under any other circumstances, but that has been the result only when the woman has taken care to maintain her own dignity always, and to regard her course as one wherein she has accepted a degree of responsibility second only to a mother's, and not a by-path leading merely to pleasure and for the idling away of an unoccupied hour. Potential manhood is a difficult force to handle, and none should embark upon the parlous enterprise of arousing it without due regard for the consequences. We may not let loose a young lion from its leash, and, when dire consequences follow, excuse ourselves on the score that we thought the devastating feature was “only a cub.”
These things flashed across my mind as I sat in Goward's room watching the poor youth in his nerve-distracting struggles, and, when I thought of the tangible evidence in hand against Aunt Elizabeth, I must confess if I had been juryman sitting in judgment of the case I should have convicted her of kidnapping without leaving the box. To begin with, there was the case of Ned Temple. I haven't quite been able to get away from the notion that however short-sighted and gauche poor Mrs. Temple's performance was in going over to the Talberts' to make a scene because of Aunt Elizabeth's attentions to Temple, she thought she was justified in doing so, and Elizabeth's entire innocence in the premises, in view of her record as a man-snatcher, has not been proven to my satisfaction. Then there was that Lyman Wilde business, which I never understood and haven't wanted to until they tried to mix poor Lorraine up in it. Certain it is that Elizabeth and Wilde were victims of an affair of the heart, but what Lorraine has had to do with it I don't know, and I hope the whole matter will be dropped at least until we have settled poor Peggy's affair. Then came Goward and this complication, and through it all Elizabeth has had a weather-eye open for Dr. Denbigh. A rather suggestive chain of evidence that, proving that Elizabeth seems to regard all men as her own individual property. As Mrs. Evarts says, she perks up even when Billie comes into the room—or Mr. Talbert, either; and as for me—well, in the strictest confidence, if Aunt Elizabeth hasn't tried to flirt even with me, then I don't know what flirtation is, and there was a time—long before I was married, of course—when I possessed certain well-developed gifts in that line. I know this, that when I was first paying my addresses to Maria, Aunt Elizabeth was staying at the Talberts' as usual, and Maria and I had all we could do to get rid of her. She seemed to be possessed with the idea that I came there every night to see her, and not a hint in the whole category of polite intimations seemed capable of conveying any other idea to her mind, although she showed at times that even a chance remark fell upon heeding ears, for once when I observed that pink was my favorite color, she blossomed out in it the next day and met me looking like a peach-tree in full bloom, on Main Street as I walked from my office up home. And while we are discussing other people's weaknesses I may as well confess my own, and say that I was so pleased at this unexpected revelation of interest in my tastes that when I called that evening I felt vaguely disappointed to learn that Aunt Elizabeth was dining out—and I was twenty-seven at the time, too, and loved Maria into the bargain! And after the wedding, when we came to say good-bye, and I kissed Aunt Elizabeth—I kissed everybody that day in the hurry to get away, even the hired man at the door—and said, “Good-bye, Aunty,” she pouted and said she didn't like the title “a little bit.”
Now, of course, I wouldn't have anybody think that I think Aunt Elizabeth was ever in love with me, but I mention these things to show her general attitude toward members of the so-called stronger sex. The chances are that she does not realize what she is doing, and assumes this coy method with the whole masculine contingent as a matter of thoughtless habit. What she wants to be to man I couldn't for the life of me even guess—mother, sister, daughter, or general manager. But that she does wish to grab every male being in sight, and attach them to her train, is pretty evident to me, and I have no doubt that this is what happened in poor Harry Goward's case. She has a bright way of saying things, is unmistakably pretty, and has an unhappy knack of making herself appear ten or fifteen years younger than she is if she needs to. She is chameleonic as to age, and takes on always something of the years of the particular man she is talking to. I saw her talking to the dominie the other night, and a more spiritual-looking bit of demure middle-aged piety you never saw in a nunnery, and the very next day when she was conversing with young George Harris, a Freshman at Yale, at the Barbers' reception, you'd have thought she was herself a Vassar undergraduate. So there you are. With Goward she had assumed that same youthful manner, and backed by all the power other thirty-seven years of experience he was mere putty in her hands, and she played with him and he lost, just as any other man, from St. Anthony down to the boniest ossified man of to-day would have lost, and it wasn't until he saw Peggy again and realized the difference between the real thing and the spurious that he waked up.
With all these facts marshalled and flashing through my brain much more rapidly than I can tell them, like the quick succession of pictures in the cinematograph, I made up my mind to become Goward's friend in so far as circumstances would permit. With Aunt Elizabeth out of the way it seemed to me that we would find all plain sailing again, but how to get rid other was the awful question. Poor Peggy could hardly be happy with such a Richmond in the field, and nothing short of Elizabeth's engagement to some other man would help matters any. She had been too long unmarried, anyhow. Maiden aunthood is an unhappy estate, and grows worse with habit. If I could only find Lyman Wilde and bring him back to her, or, perhaps, Dr. Denbigh—that was the more immediate resource, and surely no sacrifice should be too great for a family physician to make for the welfare of his patients. Maria and I would invite Dr. Denbigh to dinner and have Aunt Elizabeth as the only other guest. We could leave them alone on some pretext or other after dinner, and leave the rest to fate—aided and abetted by Elizabeth herself.
Meanwhile there was Goward still on my hands.
“Well, my boy,” I said, patting him kindly on the shoulder, “I hardly know what to say to you about this thing. You've got yourself in the dickens of a box, but I don't mind telling you I think your heart is in the right place, and, whatever has happened, I don't believe you have intentionally done wrong. Maybe at your age you do not realize that it is not safe to be engaged to two people at the same time, especially when they belong to the same family. Scientific heart-breakers, as a rule, take care that their fiancees are not only not related, but live in different sections of the country, and as I have no liking for preaching I shall not dwell further upon the subject.”
“I think I realize my position keenly enough without putting you to the trouble,” said Goward, gazing gloomily out of the window.
“What I will say, however,” said I, “is that I'll do all I can to help you out of your trouble. As one son-in-law to another, eh?”
“You are very kind,” said he, gripping me by the hand.
“I will go to Mrs. Talbert—she is the best one to talk to—first, and tell her just what you have told me, and it is just possible that she can explain it to Peggy,” I went on.
“I—I think I could do that myself if I only had the chance,” he said, ruefully.
“Well, then—I'll try to make the chance. I won't promise that I will make it, because I can't answer for anybody but myself. Some day you will find out that women are peculiar. But what I can do I will,” said I. “And, furthermore, as the general attorney for the family I will cross-examine Aunt Elizabeth—put her through the third degree, as it were, and try to show her how foolish it is for her to make so serious a matter of a trifling flirtation.”
“I wouldn't, if I were you,” said Goward, with a frown. “She needn't be involved in the affair any more than she already is. She is not in the least to blame.”
“Nevertheless,” said I, “she may be able to help us to an easy way out—”
“She can't,” said Goward, positively.
“Excuse me, Mr. Goward,” said I, chilling a trifle in my newly acquired friendliness, “but is there any real reason why I should not question Miss Talbert—”
“Oh no, none at all,” he hastened to reply. “Only I—I see no particular object in vexing her further in a matter that must have already annoyed her sufficiently. It is very good of you to take all this trouble on my account, and I don't wish you to add further to your difficulties, either,” he added.
I appreciated his consideration, with certain reservations. However, the latter were not of such character as to make me doubt the advisability of standing his friend, and when we parted a few minutes later I left him with the intention of becoming his advocate with Peggy and her mother, and at the same time of having it out with Aunt Elizabeth.
I was detained at my office by other matters, which our family troubles had caused me to neglect, until supper-time, and then I returned to my own home, expecting to have a little chat over the affair with Maria before acquainting the rest of the family with my impressions of Goward and his responsibility for our woe. Maria is always so full of good ideas, but at half-past six she had not come in, and at six-forty-five she 'phoned me that she was at her father's and would I not better go there for tea. In the Talbert family a suggestion of that sort is the equivalent of a royal command in Great Britain, and I at once proceeded to accept it. As I was leaving the house, however, the thought flashed across my mind that in my sympathy for Harry Goward I had neglected to ask him the question I had sought him out to ask, “To whom was the letter addressed?” So I returned to the 'phone, and ringing up the Eagle Hotel, inquired for Mr. Goward.
“Mr. Goward!” came the answer.
“Yes,” said I. “Mr. Henry Goward.”
“Mr. Goward left for New York on the 5.40 train this afternoon,” was the reply.
The answer, so unexpected and unsettling to all my plans, stunned me first and then angered me.
“Bah!” I cried, impatiently. “The little fool! An attack of cold feet, I guess—he ought to spell his name with a C.”
I hung up the receiver with a cold chill, for frankly I hated to go to the Talberts' with the news. Moreover, it would be a humiliating confession to make that I had forgotten to ask Goward about the letter, when everybody knew that that was what I had called upon him for, and when I thought of all the various expressions in the very expressive Talbert eyes that would fix themselves upon me as I mumbled out my confession, I would have given much to be well out of it. Nevertheless, since there was no avoiding the ordeal, I resolved to face the music, and five minutes later entered the dining-room at my father-in-law's house with as stiff an upper lip as I could summon to my aid in the brief time at my disposal. They were all seated at the table already—supper is not a movable feast in that well-regulated establishment—save Aunt Elizabeth. Her place was vacant.
“Sorry to be late,” said I, after respectfully saluting my mother-in-law, “but I couldn't help it. Things turned up at the last minute and they had to be attended to. Where's Aunt Elizabeth?”
“She went to New York,” said my mother-in-law, “on the 5.40 train.”
It's evidently a great thing in life to have got hold of a convenient expression, and a sign of our inordinate habit of living by words. I have sometimes flattered myself that I live less exclusively by them than the people about me; paying with them, paying with them only, as the phrase is (there I am at it, exactly, again!) rather less than my companions, who, with the exception, perhaps, a little—sometimes!—of poor Mother, succeed by their aid in keeping away from every truth, in ignoring every reality, as comfortably as possible. Poor Mother, who is worth all the rest of us put together, and is really worth two or three of poor Father, deadly decent as I admit poor Father mainly to be, sometimes meets me with a look, in some connection, suggesting that, deep within, she dimly understands, and would really understand a little better if she weren't afraid to: for, like all of us, she lives surrounded by the black forest of the “facts of life” very much as the people in the heart of Africa live in their dense wilderness of nocturnal terrors, the mysteries and monstrosities that make them seal themselves up in the huts as soon as it gets dark. She, quite exquisite little Mother, would often understand, I believe, if she dared, if she knew how to dare; and the vague, dumb interchange then taking place between us, and from the silence of which we have never for an instant deviated, represents perhaps her wonder as to whether I mayn't on some great occasion show her how.
The difficulty is that, alas, mere intelligent useless wretch as I am, I've never hitherto been sure of knowing how myself; for am I too not as steeped in fears as any of them? My fears, mostly, are different, and of different dangers—also I hate having them, whereas they love them and hug them to their hearts; but the fact remains that, save in this private precinct of my overflow, which contains, under a strong little brass lock, several bad words and many good resolutions, I have never either said or done a bold thing in my life. What I seem always to feel, doubtless cravenly enough, under her almost pathetic appeal, has been that it isn't yet the occasion, the really good and right one, for breaking out; than which nothing could more resemble of course the inveterate argument of the helpless. ANY occasion is good enough for the helpful; since there's never any that hasn't weak sides for their own strength to make up. However, if there COULD be conceivably a good one, I'll be hanged if I don't seem to see it gather now, and if I sha'n't write myself here “poor” Charles Edward in all truth by failing to take advantage of it, (They have in fact, I should note, one superiority of courage to my own: this habit of their so constantly casting up my poverty at me—poverty of character, of course I mean, for they don't, to do them justice, taunt me with having “made” so little. They don't, I admit, take their lives in their hands when they perform that act; the proposition itself being that I haven't the spirit of a fished-out fly.)
My point is, at any rate, that I designate THEM as Poor only in the abysmal confidence of these occult pages: into which I really believe even my poor wife—for it's universal!—has never succeeded in peeping. It will be a shock to me if I some day find she has so far adventured—and this not on account of the curiosity felt or the liberty taken, but on account of her having successfully disguised it. She knows I keep an intermittent diary—I've confessed to her it's the way in which I work things in general, my feelings and impatiences and difficulties, off. It's the way I work off my nerves—that luxury in which poor Charles Edward's natural narrow means—narrow so far as ever acknowledged—don't permit him to indulge. No one for a moment suspects I have any nerves, and least of all what they themselves do to them; no one, that is, but poor little Mother again—who, however, again, in her way, all timorously and tenderly, has never mentioned it: any more than she has ever mentioned her own, which she would think quite indecent. This is precisely one of the things that, while it passes between us as a mute assurance, makes me feel myself more than the others verily HER child: more even than poor little Peg at the present strained juncture.
But what I was going to say above all is that I don't care that poor Lorraine—since that's my wife's inimitable name, which I feel every time I write it I must apologize even to myself for!—should quite discover the moments at which, first and last, I've worked HER off. Yet I've made no secret of my cultivating it as a resource that helps me to hold out; this idea of our “holding out,” separately and together, having become for us—and quite comically, as I see—the very basis of life. What does it mean, and how and why and to what end are we holding? I ask myself that even while I feel how much we achieve even by just hugging each other over the general intensity of it. This is what I have in mind as to our living to that extent by the vain phrase; as to our really from time to time winding ourselves up by the use of it, and winding each other. What should we do if we didn't hold out, and of what romantic, dramatic, or simply perhaps quite prosaic, collapse would giving in, in contradistinction, consist for us? We haven't in the least formulated that—though it perhaps may but be one of the thousand things we are afraid of.
At any rate we don't, I think, ever so much as ask ourselves, and much less each other: we're so quite sufficiently sustained and inflamed by the sense that we're just doing it, and that in the sublime effort our union is our strength. There must be something in it, for the more intense we make the consciousness—and haven't we brought it to as fine a point as our frequently triumphant partnership at bridge?—the more it positively does support us. Poor Lorraine doesn't really at all need to understand in order to believe; she believes that, failing our exquisite and intimate combined effort of resistance, we should be capable together of something—well, “desperate.” It's in fact in this beautiful desperation that we spend our days, that we face the pretty grim prospect of new ones, that we go and come and talk and pretend, that we consort, so far as in our deep-dyed hypocrisy we do consort, with the rest of the Family, that we have Sunday supper with the Parents and emerge, modestly yet virtuously shining, from the ordeal; that we put in our daily appearance at the Works—for a utility nowadays so vague that I'm fully aware (Lorraine isn't so much) of the deep amusement I excite there, though I also recognize how wonderfully, how quite charitably, they manage not to break out with it: bless, for the most part, their dear simple hearts! It is in this privately exalted way that we bear in short the burden of our obloquy, our failure, our resignation, our sacrifice of what we should have liked, even if it be a matter we scarce dare to so much as name to each other; and above all of our insufferable reputation for an abject meekness. We're really not meek a bit—we're secretly quite ferocious; but we're held to be ashamed of ourselves not only for our proved business incompetence, but for our lack of first-rate artistic power as well: it being now definitely on record that we've never yet designed a single type of ice-pitcher—since that's the damnable form Father's production more and more runs to; his uncanny ideal is to turn out more ice-pitchers than any firm in the world—that has “taken” with their awful public. We've tried again and again to strike off something hideous enough, but it has always in these cases appeared to us quite beautiful compared to the object finally turned out, on their improved lines, for the unspeakable market; so that we've only been able to be publicly rueful and depressed about it, and to plead practically, in extenuation of all the extra trouble we saddle them with, that such things are, alas, the worst we can do.
We so far succeed in our plea that we're held at least to sit, as I say, in contrition, and to understand how little, when it comes to a reckoning, we really pay our way. This actually passes, I think for the main basis of our humility, as it's certainly the basis of what I feel to be poor Mother's unuttered yearning. It almost broke her heart that we SHOULD have to live in such shame—she has only got so far as that yet. But it's a beginning; and I seem to make out that if I don't spoil it by any wrong word, if I don't in fact break the spell by any wrong breath, she'll probably come on further. It will glimmer upon her—some day when she looks at me in her uncomfortable bewildered tenderness, and I almost hypnotize her by just smiling inscrutably back—that she isn't getting all the moral benefit she somehow ought out of my being so pathetically wrong; and then she'll begin to wonder and wonder, all to herself, if there mayn't be something to be said for me. She has limped along, in her more or less dissimulated pain, on this apparently firm ground that I'm so wrong that nothing will do for either of us but a sweet, solemn, tactful agreement between us never to mention it. It falls in so richly with all the other things, all the “real” things, we never mention.
Well, it's doubtless an odd fact to be setting down even here; but I SHALL be sorry for her on the day when her glimmer, as I have called it, broadens—when it breaks on her that if I'm as wrong as this comes to, why the others must be actively and absolutely right. She has never had to take it quite THAT way—so women, even mothers, wondrously get on; and heaven help her, as I say, when she shall. She'll be immense—“tactfully” immense, with Father about it—she'll manage that, for herself and for him, all right; but where the iron will enter into her will be at the thought of her having for so long given raison, as they say in Paris—or as poor Lorraine at least says they say—to a couple like Maria and Tom Price. It comes over her that she has taken it largely from THEM (and she HAS) that we're living in immorality, Lorraine and I: ah THEN, poor dear little Mother—! Upon my word I believe I'd go on lying low to this positive pitch of grovelling—and Lorraine, charming, absurd creature, would back me up in it too—in order precisely to save Mother such a revulsion. It will be really more trouble than it will be worth to her; since it isn't as if our relation weren't, of its kind, just as we are, about as “dear” as it can be.
I'd literally much rather help her not to see than to see; I'd much rather help her to get on with the others (yes, even including poor Father, the fine damp plaster of whose composition, renewed from week to week, can't be touched anywhere without letting your finger in, without peril of its coming to pieces) in the way easiest for her—if not easiest TO her. She couldn't live with the others an hour—no, not with one of them, unless with poor little Peg—save by accepting all their premises, save by making in other words all the concessions and having all the imagination. I ask from her nothing of this—I do the whole thing with her, as she has to do it with them; and of this, au fond, as Lorraine again says, she is ever so subtly aware—just as, FOR it, she's ever so dumbly grateful. Let these notes stand at any rate for my fond fancy of that, and write it here to my credit in letters as big and black as the tearful alphabet of my childhood; let them do this even if everything else registers meaner things. I'm perfectly willing to recognize, as grovellingly as any one likes, that, as grown-up and as married and as preoccupied and as disillusioned, or at least as battered and seasoned (by adversity) as possible, I'm in respect to HER as achingly filial and as feelingly dependent, all the time, as when I used, in the far-off years, to wake up, a small blubbering idiot, from frightening dreams, and refuse to go to sleep again, in the dark, till I clutched her hands or her dress and felt her bend over me.
She used to protect me then from domestic derision—for she somehow kept such passages quiet; but she can't (it's where HER ache comes in!) protect me now from a more insidious kind. Well, now I don't care! I feel it in Maria and Tom, constantly, who offer themselves as the pattern of success in comparison with which poor Lorraine and I are nowhere. I don't say they do it with malice prepense, or that they plot against us to our ruin; the thing operates rather as an extraordinary effect of their mere successful blatancy. They're blatant, truly, in the superlative degree, and I call them successfully so for just this reason, that poor Mother is to all appearance perfectly unaware of it. Maria is the one member of all her circle that has got her really, not only just ostensibly, into training; and it's a part of the general irony of fate that neither she nor my terrible sister herself recognizes the truth of this. The others, even to poor Father, think they manage and manipulate her, and she can afford to let them think it, ridiculously, since they don't come anywhere near it. She knows they don't and is easy with them; playing over Father in especial with finger-tips so lightly resting and yet so effectively tickling, that he has never known at a given moment either where they were or, in the least, what they were doing to him. That's enough for Mother, who keeps by it the freedom other soul; yet whose fundamental humility comes out in its being so hidden from her that her eldest daughter, to whom she allows the benefit of every doubt, does damnably boss her.
This is the one case in which she's not lucid; and, to make it perfect, Maria, whose humility is neither fundamental nor superficial, but whose avidity is both, comfortably cherishes, as a ground of complaint—nurses in fact, beatifically, as a wrong—the belief that she's the one person without influence. Influence?—why she has so much on ME that she absolutely coerces me into making here these dark and dreadful remarks about her! Let my record establish, in this fashion, that if I'm a clinging son I'm, in that quarter, to make up for it, a detached brother. Deadly virtuous and deadly hard and deadly charmless—also, more than anything, deadly sure I—how does Maria fit on, by consanguinity, to such amiable characters, such REAL social values, as Mother and me at all? If that question ceases to matter, sometimes, during the week, it flares up, on the other hand, at Sunday supper, down the street, where Tom and his wife, overwhelmingly cheerful and facetious, contrast so favorably with poor gentle sickly (as we doubtless appear) Lorraine and me. We can't meet them—that is I can't meet Tom—on that ground, the furious football-field to which he reduces conversation, making it echo as with the roar of the arena—one little bit.
Of course, with such deep diversity of feeling, we simply loathe each other, he and I; but the sad thing is that we get no good of it, none of the TRUE joy of life, the joy of our passions and perceptions and desires, by reason of our awful predetermined geniality and the strange abysmal necessity of our having so eternally to put up with each other. If we could intermit that vain superstition somehow, for about three minutes, I often think the air might clear (as by the scramble of the game of General Post, or whatever they call it) and we should all get out of our wrong corners and find ourselves in our right, glaring from these positions a happy and natural defiance. Then I shouldn't be thus nominally and pretendedly (it's too ignoble!) on the same side or in the same air as my brother-in-law; whose value is that he has thirty “business ideas” a day, while I shall never have had the thirtieth fraction of one in my whole life. He just hums, Tom Price, with business ideas, whereas I just gape with the impossibility of them; he moves in the densest we carry our heads here on August evenings, each with its own thick nimbus of mosquitoes. I'm but too conscious of how, on the other hand, I'm desolately outlined to all eyes, in an air as pure and empty as that of a fine Polar sunset.
It was Lorraine, dear quaint thing, who some time ago made the remark (on our leaving one of those weekly banquets at which we figure positively as a pair of social skeletons) that Tom's facetae multiply, evidently, in direct proportion to his wealth of business ideas; so that whenever he's enormously funny we may take it that he's “on” something tremendous. He's sprightly in proportion as he's in earnest, and innocent in proportion as he's going to be dangerous; dangerous, I mean, to the competitor and the victim. Indeed when I reflect that his jokes are probably each going to cost certain people, wretched helpless people like myself, hundreds and thousands of dollars, their abundant flow affects me as one of the most lurid of exhibitions. I've sometimes rather wondered that Father can stand so much of him. Father who has after all a sharp nerve or two in him, like a razor gone astray in a valise of thick Jager underclothing; though of course Maria, pulling with Tom shoulder to shoulder, would like to see any one NOT stand her husband.
The explanation has struck me as, mostly, that business genial and cheerful and even obstreperous, without detriment to its BEING business, has been poor Father's ideal for his own terrible kind. This ideal is, further, that his home-life shall attest that prosperity. I think it has even been his conception that our family tone shall by its sweet innocence fairly register the pace at which the Works keep ahead: so that he has the pleasure of feeling us as funny and slangy here as people can only be who have had the best of the bargains other people are having occasion to rue. We of course don't know—that is Mother and Grandmamma don't, in any definite way (any more than I do, thanks to my careful stupidity) how exceeding small some of the material is consciously ground in the great grim, thrifty mill of industrial success; and indeed we grow about as many cheap illusions and easy comforts in the faintly fenced garden of our little life as could very well be crammed into the space.
Poor Grandmamma—since I've mentioned her—appears to me always the aged wan Flora of our paradise; the presiding divinity, seated in the centre, under whose pious traditions, REALLY quite dim and outlived, our fond sacrifices are offered. Queer enough the superstition that Granny is a very solid and strenuous and rather grim person, with a capacity for facing the world, that we, a relaxed generation, have weakly lost. She knows as much about the world as a tin jelly-mould knows about the dinner, and is the oddest mixture of brooding anxieties over things that don't in the least matter and of bland failure to suspect things that intensely do. She lives in short in a weird little waste of words—over the moral earnestness we none of us cultivate; yet hasn't a notion of any effective earnestness herself except on the subject of empty bottles, which have, it would appear, noble neglected uses. At this time of day it doesn't matter, but if there could have been dropped into her empty bottles, at an earlier stage, something to strengthen a little any wine of life they were likely to contain, she wouldn't have figured so as the head and front of all our sentimentality.
I judge it, for that matter, a proof of our flat “modernity” in this order that the scant starch holding her together is felt to give her among us this antique and austere consistency. I don't talk things over with Lorraine for nothing, and she does keep for me the flashes of perception we neither of us waste on the others. It's the “antiquity of the age of crinoline,” she said the other day a propos of a little carte-de-visite photograph of my ancestress as a young woman of the time of the War; looking as if she had been violently inflated from below, but had succeeded in resisting at any cost, and with a strange intensity of expression, from her waist up. Mother, however, I must say, is as wonderful about her as about everything else, and arranges herself, exactly, to appear a mere contemporary illustration (being all the while three times the true picture) in order that her parent shall have the importance of the Family Portrait. I don't mean of course that she has told me so; but she cannot see that if she hasn't that importance Granny has none other; and it's therefore as if she pretended she had a ruff, a stomacher, a farthingale and all the rest—grand old angles and eccentricities and fine absurdities: the hard white face, if necessary, of one who has seen witches burned.
She hasn't any more than any one else among us a gleam of fine absurdity: that's a product that seems unable, for the life of it, and though so indispensable (say) for literary material, to grow here; but, exquisitely determined she shall have Character lest she perish—while it's assumed we still need her—Mother makes it up for her, with a turn of the hand, out of bits left over from her own, far from economically as her own was originally planned; scraps of spiritual silk and velvet that no one takes notice of missing. And Granny, as in the dignity of her legend, imposes, ridiculous old woman, on every one—Granny passes for one of the finest old figures in the place, while Mother is never discovered. So is history always written, and so is truth mostly worshipped. There's indeed one thing, I'll do her the justice to say, as to which she has a glimmer of vision—as to which she had it a couple of years ago; I was thoroughly with her in her deprecation of the idea that Peggy should be sent, to crown her culture, to that horrid co-educative college from which the poor child returned the other day so preposterously engaged to be married; and, if she had only been a little more actively with me we might perhaps between us have done something about it. But she has a way of deprecating with her long, knobby, mittened hand over her mouth, and of looking at the same time, in a mysterious manner, down into one of the angles of the room—it reduces her protest to a feebleness: she's incapable of seeing in it herself more than a fraction of what it has for her, and really thinks it would be wicked and abandoned, would savor of Criticism, which is the cardinal sin with her, to see all, or to follow any premise to it in the right direction.
Still, there was the happy chance, at the time the question came up, that she had retained, on the subject of promiscuous colleges, the mistrust of the age of crinoline: as to which in fact that little old photograph, with its balloon petticoat and its astonishingly flat, stiff “torso,” might have imaged some failure of the attempt to blow the heresy into her. The true inwardness of the history, at the crisis, was that our fell Maria had made up her mind that Peg should go—and that, as I have noted, the thing our fell Maria makes up her mind to among us is in nine cases out of ten the thing that is done. Maria still takes, in spite of her partial removal to a wider sphere, the most insidious interest in us, and the beauty of her affectionate concern for the welfare of her younger sisters is the theme of every tongue. She observed to Lorraine, in a moment of rare expansion, more than a year ago, that she had got their two futures perfectly fixed, and that as Peggy appeared to have “some mind,” though how much she wasn't yet sure, it should be developed, what there was of it, on the highest modern lines: Peggy would never be thought generally, that is physically, attractive anyway. She would see about Alice, the brat, later on, though meantime she had her idea—the idea that Alice was really going to have the looks and would at a given moment break out into beauty: in which event she should be run for that, and for all it might be worth, and she, Maria, would be ready to take the contract.
This is the kind of patronage of us that passes, I believe, among her more particular intimates, for “so sweet” of her; it being of course Maria all over to think herself subtle for just reversing, with a “There—see how original I am?” any benighted conviction usually entertained. I don't know that any one has ever thought Alice, the brat, intellectual; but certainly no one has ever judged her even potentially handsome, in the light of no matter which of those staggering girl-processes that suddenly produce features, in flat faces, and “figure,” in the void of space, as a conjurer pulls rabbits out of a sheet of paper and yards of ribbon out of nothing. Moreover, if any one SHOULD know, Lorraine and I, with our trained sense for form and for “values,” certainly would. However, it doesn't matter; the whole thing being but a bit of Maria's system of bluffing in order to boss. Peggy hasn't more than the brain, in proportion to the rest of her, of a small swelling dove on a window-sill; but she's extremely pretty and absolutely nice, a little rounded pink-billed presence that pecks up gratefully any grain of appreciation.
I said to Mother, I remember, at the time—I took that plunge: “I hope to goodness you're not going to pitch that defenceless child into any such bear garden!” and she replied that to make a bear-garden you first had to have bears, and she didn't suppose the co-educative young men could be so described. “Well then,” said I, “would you rather I should call them donkeys, or even monkeys? What I mean is that the poor girl—a perfect little DECORATIVE person, who ought to have iridescent-gray plumage and pink-shod feet to match the rest of her—shouldn't be thrust into any general menagerie-cage, but be kept for the dovecote and the garden, kept where we may still hear her coo. That's what, at college, they'll make her unlearn; she'll learn to roar and snarl with the other animals. Think of the vocal sounds with which she may come back to us!” Mother appeared to think, but asked me, after a moment, as a result of it, in which of the cages of the New York Art League menagerie, and among what sort of sounds, I had found Lorraine—who was a product of co-education if there ever had been one, just as our marriage itself had been such a product.
I replied to this—well, what I could easily reply; but I asked, I recollect, in the very forefront, if she were sending Peg to college to get married. She declared it was the last thing she was in a hurry about, and that she believed there was no danger, but her great argument let the cat out of the bag. “Maria feels the want of it—of a college education; she feels it would have given her more confidence”; and I shall in fact never forget the little look of strange supplication that she gave me with these words. What it meant was: “Now don't ask me to go into the question, for the moment, any further: it's in the acute stage—and you know how soon Maria can BRING a question to a head. She has settled it with your Father—in other words has settled it FOR him: settled it in the sense that we didn't give HER, at the right time, the advantage she ought to have had. It would have given her confidence—from the want of which, acquired at that age, she feels she so suffers; and your Father thinks it fine of her to urge that her little sister shall profit by her warning. Nothing works on him, you know, so much as to hear it hinted that we've failed of our duty to any of you; and you can see how it must work when he can be persuaded that Maria—!”
“Hasn't colossal cheek?”—I took the words out of her mouth. “With such colossal cheek what NEED have you of confidence, which is such an inferior form—?”
The long and short was of course that Peggy went; believing on her side, poor dear, that it might for future relations give her the pull of Maria. This represents, really, I think, the one spark of guile in Peggy's breast: the smart of a small grievance suffered at her sister's hands in the dim long-ago. Maria slapped her face, or ate up her chocolates, or smeared her copy-book, or something of that sort; and the sound of the slap still reverberates in Peg's consciousness, the missed sweetness still haunts her palate, the smutch of the fair page (Peg writes an immaculate little hand and Maria a wretched one—the only thing she can't swagger about) still affronts her sight. Maria also, to do her justice, has a vague hankering, under which she has always been restive, to make up for the outrage; and the form the compunction now takes is to get her away. It's one of the facts of our situation all round, I may thus add, that every one wants to get some one else away, and that there are indeed one or two of us upon whom, to that end, could the conspiracy only be occult enough—which it can never!—all the rest would effectively concentrate.
Father would like to shunt Granny—it IS monstrous his having his mother-in-law a fixture under his roof; though, after all, I'm not sure this patience doesn't rank for him as one of those domestic genialities that allow his conscience a bolder and tighter business hand; a curious service, this sort of thing, I note, rendered to the business conscience throughout our community. Mother, at any rate, and small blame to her, would like to “shoo” off Eliza, as Lorraine and I, in our deepest privacy, call Aunt Elizabeth; the Tom Prices would like to extirpate US, of course; we would give our most immediate jewel to clear the sky of the Tom Prices; und so weiter. And I think we should really all band together, for once in our lives, in an unnatural alliance to get rid of Eliza. The beauty as to THIS is, moreover, that I make out the rich if dim, dawn of that last-named possibility (which I've been secretly invoking, all this year, for poor Mother's sake); and as the act of mine own right hand, moreover, without other human help. But of that anon; the IMMEDIATELY striking thing being meanwhile again the strange stultification of the passions in us, which prevents anything ever from coming to an admitted and avowed head.
Maria can be trusted, as I have said, to bring on the small crisis, every time; but she's as afraid as any one else of the great one, and she's moreover, I write it with rapture, afraid of Eliza. Eliza is the one person in our whole community she does fear—and for reasons I perfectly grasp; to which moreover, this extraordinary oddity attaches, that I positively feel I don't fear Eliza in the least (and in fact promise myself before long to show it) and yet don't at all avail by that show of my indifference to danger to inspire my sister with the least terror in respect to myself. It's very funny, the DEGREE of her dread of Eliza, who affects her, evidently, as a person of lurid “worldly” possibilities—the one innocent light in which poor Maria wears for me what Lorraine calls a weird pathos; and perhaps, after all, on the day I shall have justified my futile passage across this agitated scene, and my questionable utility here below every way, by converting our aunt's lively presence into a lively absence, it may come over her that I AM to be recognized. I in fact dream at times, with high intensity, that I see the Prices some day quite turn pale as they look at each other and find themselves taking me in.
I've made up my mind at any rate that poor Mother shall within the year be relieved in one way or another of her constant liability to her sister-in-law's visitations. It isn't to be endured that her house should be so little her own house as I've known Granny and Eliza, between them, though after a different fashion, succeed in making it appear; and yet the action to take will, I perfectly see, never by any possibility come from poor Father. He accepts his sister's perpetual re-arrivals, under the law of her own convenience, with a broad-backed serenity which I find distinctly irritating (if I may use the impious expression) and which makes me ask myself how he sees poor Mother's “position” at all. The truth is poor Father never does “see” anything of that sort, in the sense of conceiving it in its relations; he doesn't know, I guess, but what the prowling Eliza HAS a position (since this is a superstition that I observe even my acute little Lorraine can't quite shake off). He takes refuge about it, as about everything, truly, in the cheerful vagueness of that general consciousness on which I have already touched: he likes to come home from the Works every day to see how good he really is, after all—and it's what poor Mother thus has to demonstrate for him by translating his benevolence, translating it to himself and to others, into “housekeeping.” If he were only good to HER he mightn't be good enough; but the more we pig together round about him the more blandly patriarchal we make him feel.
Eliza meanwhile, at any rate, is spoiling for a dose—if ever a woman required one; and I seem already to feel in the air the gathering elements of the occasion that awaits me for administering it. All of which it is a comfort somehow to maunder away on here. As I read over what I have written the aspects of our situation multiply so in fact that I note again how one has only to look at any human thing very straight (that is with the minimum of intelligence) to see it shine out in as many aspects as the hues of the prism; or place itself, in other words, in relations that positively stop nowhere. I've often thought I should like some day to write a novel; but what would become of me in that case—delivered over, I mean, before my subject, to my extravagant sense that everything is a part of something else? When you paint a picture with a brush and pigments, that is on a single plane, it can stop at your gilt frame; but when you paint one with a pen and words, that is in ALL the dimensions, how are you to stop? Of course, as Lorraine says, “Stopping, that's art; and what are we artists like, my dear, but those drivers of trolley-cars, in New York, who, by some divine instinct, recognize in the forest of pillars and posts the white-striped columns at which they may pull up? Yes, we're drivers of trolley-cars charged with electric force and prepared to go any distance from which the consideration of a probable smash ahead doesn't deter us.”
That consideration deters me doubtless even a little here—in spite of my seeing the track, to the next bend, so temptingly clear. I should like to note for instance, for my own satisfaction (though no fellow, thank God, was ever less a prey to the ignoble fear of inconsistency) that poor Mother's impugnment of my acquisition of Lorraine didn't in the least disconcert me. I did pick Lorraine—then a little bleating stray lamb collared with a blue ribbon and a tinkling silver bell—out of our New York bear-garden; but it interests me awfully to recognize that, whereas the kind of association is one I hate for my small Philistine sister, who probably has the makings of a nice, dull, dressed, amiable, insignificant woman, I recognize it perfectly as Lorraine's native element and my own; or at least don't at all mind her having been dipped in it. It has tempered and plated us for the rest of life, and to an effect different enough from the awful metallic wash of our Company's admired ice-pitchers. We artists are at the best children of despair—a certain divine despair, as Lorraine naturally says; and what jollier place for laying it in abundantly than the Art League? As for Peg, however, I won't hear of her having anything to do with this; she shall despair of nothing worse than the “hang” of her skirt or the moderation other hat—and not often, if I can help her, even of those.