by Owen Wister
XVI: The Steel Wasp
Certainly Hortense Rieppe would have won the battle of Chattanooga!I know not from which parent that young woman inherited her gift ofstrategy, but she was a master. To use the resources of one loverin order to ascertain if another lover had any; to lay tribute oneverything that Charley possessed; on his influence in the businessworld, which enabled him to walk into the V-C Chemical Company's officeand borrow an expert in the phosphate line; on his launch in which topop the expert and take him up the river, and see in his company andlearn from his lips just what resources of worldly wealth were likely tobe in-store for John Mayrant; and finally (which was the key to allthe rest) on his inveterate passion for her, on his banker-likedetermination through all the thick and thin of discouragement, andworse than discouragement, of contemptuous coquetry, to possess her atany cost he could afford;--to use all this that Charley had, in orderthat she might judiciously arrive at the decision whether she would takehim or his rival, left one lost in admiration. And then, not to wastea moment! To reach town one evening, and next morning by ten o'clockto have that expert safe in the launch on his way up the river to thephosphate diggings! The very audacity of such unscrupulousness commandedmy respect: successful dishonor generally wins louder applause thansuccessful virtue. But to be married to her! Oh! not for worlds! Charleymight meet such emergency, but poor John, never!
I nearly walked into Mrs. Weguelin and Mrs. Gregory taking theircustomary air slowly in South Place.
"But why a steel wasp?" I said at once to Mrs. Weguelin. It was a morefamiliar way of beginning with the little, dignified lady than wouldhave been at all possible, or suitable, if we had not had that littlejoke about the piano snobile between us. As it was, she was not whollydispleased. These Kings Port old ladies grew, I suspect, very slowlyand guardedly accustomed to any outsider; they allowed themselves veryseldom to suffer any form of abruptness from him, or from any one, forthat matter. But, once they were reassured as to him, then they mightsometimes allow the privileged person certain departures from theirown rule of deportment, because his conventions were recognized to bedifferent from theirs. Moreover, in reminding Mrs. Weguelin of the steelwasp, I had put my abruptness in "quotations," so to speak, by thetone I gave it, just as people who are particular in speech can ofteninterpolate a word of current slang elegantly by means of the shade ofemphasis which they lay upon it.
So Mrs. Weguelin smiled and her dark eyes danced a little. "You rememberI said that, then?"
"I remember everything that you said."
"How much have you seen of the creature?" demanded Mrs. Gregory, withher head pretty high.
"Well, I'm seeing more, and more, and more every minute. She's ratherendless."
Mrs. Weguelin looked reproachful. "You surely cannot admire her, too?"
Mrs. Gregory hadn't understood me. "Oh, if you really can keep her away,you're welcome!"
"I only meant," I explained to the ladies, "that you don't really beginto see her till you have seen her: it's afterward, when you're out ofreach of the spell." And I told them of the interview which I had notbeen able to tell to Miss Josephine and Miss Eliza. "I doubt if itlasted more than four minutes," I assured them.
"Up the river?" repeated Mrs. Gregory
"At the landing," I repeated. And the ladies consulted each other'sexpressions. But that didn't bother me any more.
"And you can admire her?" Mrs. Weguelin persisted.
"May I tell you exactly, precisely?"
"Oh, do!" they both exclaimed.
"Well, I think many wise men would find her immensely desirable--assomebody else's wife!"
At this remark Mrs. Weguelin dropped her eyes, but I knew they weredancing beneath their lids. "I should not have permitted myself to saythat, but I am glad that it has been said."
Mrs. Gregory turned to her companion. "Shall we call to-morrow?"
"Don't you feel it must be done?" returned Mrs. Weguelin, and then sheaddressed me. "Do you know a Mr. Beverly Rodgers?"
I gave him a golden recommendation and took my leave of the ladies.
So they were going to do the handsome thing; they would ring theCornerlys' bell; they would cross the interloping threshold, they wouldrecognize the interloping girl; and this meant that they had given itup. It meant that Miss Eliza had given it up, too, had at last abandonedher position that the marriage would never take place. And her own acthad probably drawn this down upon her. When the trustee of that estatehad told her of the apparent failure of the phosphates, she had hailedit as an escape for her beloved John, and for all of them, because shemade sure that Hortense would never marry a virtually penniless man. Andwhen the work went on, and the rich fortune was unearthed after all, herinfluence had caused that revelation to be delayed because she was soconfident that the engagement would be broken. But she had reckonedwithout Hortense; worse than that, she had reckoned without JohnMayrant; in her meddling attempt to guide his affairs in the way thatshe believed would be best for him, she forgot that the boy whom she hadbrought up was no longer a child, and thus she unpardonably ignored hisrights as a man. And now Miss Josephine's disapproval was vindicated,and her own casuistry was doubly punished. Miss Rieppe's astute journeyof investigation--for her purpose had evidently become suspected by someof them beforehand--had forced Miss Eliza to disclose the truth aboutthe phosphates to her nephew before it should be told him by the girlherself; and the intolerable position of apparent duplicity precipitatedtwo wholly inevitable actions on his part; he had bound himself morethan ever to marry Hortense, and he had made a furious breach with hisAunt Eliza. That was what his letter had contained; this time he hadbanished himself from that house. What was his Aunt Eliza going to doabout it? I wondered. She was a stiff, if indiscreet, old lady, and itcertainly did not fall within her view of the proprieties that youngpeople should take their elders to task in furious letters. But shehad been totally in the wrong, and her fault was irreparable, becauseimportant things had happened in consequence of it; she might repent thefault in sackcloth and ashes, but she couldn't stop the things. Wouldshe, then, honorably wear the sackcloth, or would she dishonestly shirkit under the false issue of her nephew's improper tone to her? Women canjustify themselves with more appalling skill than men.
One drop there was in all this bitter bucket, which must have tastedsweet to John. He had resigned from the Custom House: Juno had gotit right this time, though she hadn't a notion of the real reason forJohn's act. This act had been, since morning, lost for me, so to speak,in the shuffle of more absorbing events; and it now rose to view againin my mind as a telling stroke in the full-length portrait that all hisacts had been painting of the boy during the last twenty-four hours.Notwithstanding a meddlesome aunt, and an arriving sweetheart, andimminent wedlock, he hadn't forgotten to stop "taking orders from anegro" at the very first opportunity which came to him; his phosphateshad done this for him, at least, and I should have the pleasure ofcorrecting Juno at tea.
But I did not have this pleasure. They were all in an excitement oversomething else, and my own different excitement hadn't a chance againstthis greater one; for people seldom wish to hear what you have to say,even under the most favorable circumstances, and never when they haveanything to say themselves. With an audience so hotly preoccupied Icouldn't have sat on Juno effectively at all, and therefore I kept itto myself, and attended very slightly to what they were telling me aboutthe Daughters of Dixie.
I bowed absently to the poetess. "And your poem?" I said. "A greatsuccess, I am sure?"
"Why, didn't you hear me say so?" said the upcountry bride; and then,after a smile at the others, "I'm sure your flowers were graciouslyaccepted."
"Ask Miss Josephine St. Michael," I replied.
"Oh, oh, oh!" went the bride. "How would she know?"
I gave myself no pains to improve or arrest this tiresome joke, and theywent back to their Daughters of Dixie; but it is rather singular howsometimes an utterly absurd notion will be the cause of our taking astep which w
e had not contemplated. I did carry some flowers to Miss LaHeu the next day. I was at some trouble to find any; for in Kings Portshops of this kind are by no means plentiful, and it was not until I hadpaid a visit to a quite distant garden at the extreme northwestern edgeof the town that I lighted upon anything worthy of the girl behind thecounter. The Exchange itself was apt to have flowers for sale, but Ihardly saw my way to buying them there, and then immediately offeringthem to the fair person who had sold them to me. As it was, I did muchbetter; for what I brought her were decidedly superior to any that wereat the Exchange when I entered it at lunch time.
They were, as the up-country bride would have put it, "graciouslyaccepted." Miss La Heu stood them in water on the counter beside herledger. She was looking lovely.
"I expected you yesterday," she said. "The new Lady Baltimore wasready."
"Well, if it is not all eaten yet--"
"Oh, no! Not a slice gone."
"Ah, nobody does your art justice here!"
"Go and sit down at your table, please."
It was really quite difficult to say to her from that distance the sortof things that I wished to say; but there seemed to be no help for it,and I did my best.
"I shall miss my lunches here very much when I'm gone."
"Did you say coffee to-day?"
"Chocolate. I shall miss--"
"And the lettuce sandwiches?"
"Yes. You don't realize how much these lunches--"
"Have cost you?" She seemed determined to keep laughing.
"You have said it. They have cost me my--"
"I can give you the receipt, you know."
"The receipt?"
"For Lady Baltimore, to take with you."
"You'll have to give me a receipt for a lost heart."
"Oh, his heart! General, listen to--" From habit she had turned towhere her dog used to lie; and sudden pain swept over her face and wasmastered. "Never mind!" she quickly resumed. "Please don't speak aboutit. And you have a heart somewhere; for it was very nice in you to comein yesterday morning after--after the bridge."
"I hope I have a heart," I began, rising; for, really, I could not go onin this way, sitting down away back at the lunch table.
But the door opened, and Hortense Rieppe came into the Woman's Exchange.
It was at me that she first looked, and she gave me the slightest bowpossible, the least sign of conventional recognition that a movementof the head could make and be visible at all; she didn't bend her headdown, she tilted it ever so little up. It wasn't new to me, this formof greeting, and I knew that she had acquired it at Newport, and that itdenoted, all too accurately, the size of my importance in her eyes; shedid it, as she did everything, with perfection. Then she turned to ElizaLa Heu, whose face had become miraculously sweet.
"Good morning," said Hortense.
It sounded from a quiet well of reserve music; just a cupful ofmelodious tone dipped lightly out of the surface. Her face hadn'tbecome anything; but it was equally miraculous in its total void of allexpression relating to this moment, or to any moment; just her beauty,her permanent stationary beauty, was there glowing in it and through it,not skin deep, but going back and back into her lazy eyes, and shiningfrom within the modulated bloom of her color and the depths of her amberhair. She was choosing, for this occasion, to be as impersonal as someradiant hour in nature, some mellow, motionless day when the leaves haveturned, but have not fallen, and it is drowsily warm; but it wasn't somuch of nature that she, in her harmonious lustre, reminded me, as ofsome beautiful silken-shaded lamp, from which color rather than lightcame with subdued ampleness.
I saw her eyes settle upon the flowers that I had brought Eliza La Heu.
"How beautiful those are!" she remarked.
"Is there something that you wish?" inquired Miss La Heu, alwaysmiraculously sweet.
"Some of your good things for lunch; a very little, if you will be sokind."
I had gone back to my table while the "very little" was being selected,and I felt, in spite of how slightly she counted me, that it would beinadequate in me to remain completely dumb.
"Mr. Mayrant is still at the Custom House?" I observed.
"For a few days, yes. Happily we shall soon break that connection." Andshe smelt my flowers.
"'We,'" I thought to myself, "is rather tremendous."
It grew more tremendous in the silence as Eliza La Heu brought me myorders. Miss Rieppe did not seat herself to take the light refreshmentwhich she found enough for lunch. Her plate and cup were set for her,but she walked about, now with one, and now with the other, taking hertime over it, and pausing here and there at some article of the Exchangestock.
Of course, she hadn't come there for any lunch; the Cornerlys had middaylunch and dined late; these innovated hours were a part of Kings Port'sdeep suspicion of the Cornerlys; but what now became interesting was herevident indifference to our perceiving that lunch was merely a pretextwith her; in fact, I think she wished it to be perceived, and I alsothink that those turns which she took about the Exchange--her apparentinspection of an old mahogany table, her examination of a pewterset--were a symbol (and meant to be a symbol) of how she had all thetime there was, and the possession of everything she wished includingthe situation, and that she enjoyed having this sink in while she wasrearranging whatever she had arranged to say, in consequence of findingthat I should also hear it. And how well she was worth looking at, nomatter whether she stood, or moved, or what she did! Her age lay beyondthe reach of the human eye; if she was twenty-five, she was marvelous inher mastery of her appearance; if she was thirty-four, she was marvelousin her mastery of perpetuating it, and by no other means than perfectdress personal to herself (for she had taken the fashion and welded itinto her own plasticity) and perfect health; for without a trace of theathletic, her graceful shape teemed with elasticity. There was a touchof "sport" in the parasol she had laid down; and with all her blendedserenity there was a touch of "sport" in her. Experience could teachher beauty nothing more; it wore the look of having been made love to bymany married men.
Quite suddenly the true light flashed upon me. I had been slow-sightedindeed! So that was what she had come here for to-day! Miss Hortensewas going to pay her compliments to Miss La Heu. I believe that my sightmight still have been slow but for that miraculous sweetness uponthe face of Eliza. She was ready for the compliments! Well, I satexpectant--and disappointment was by no means my lot.
Hortense finished her lunch. "And so this interesting place is where youwork?"
Eliza, thus addressed, assented.
"And you furnish wedding cakes also?"
Eliza was continuously and miraculously sweet. "The Exchange includesthat."
"I shall hope you will be present to taste some of yours on the day itis mine."
"I shall accept the invitation if my friends send me one."
No blood flowed from Hortense at this, and she continued with the samesmooth deliberation.
"The list is of necessity very small; but I shall see that it includesyou."
"You are not going to postpone it any more, then?"
No blood flowed at this, either. "I doubt if John--if Mr. Mayrant--wouldbrook further delay, and my father seems stronger, at last. How much doI owe you for your very good food?"
It is a pity that a larger audience could not have been there to enjoythis skilful duet, for it held me hanging on every musical word of it.There, at the far back end of the long room, I sat alone at mytable, pretending to be engaged over a sandwich that was no more inexistence--external, I mean--and a totally empty cup of chocolate. Ilifted the cup, and bowed over the plate, and used the paper Japanesenapkin, and generally went through the various discreet paces of eating,quite breathless, all the while, to know which of them was coming outahead. There was no fairness in their positions; Hortense had Eliza ina cage, penned in by every fact; but it doesn't do to go too near somebirds, even when they're caged, and, while these two birds had beengiving their sweet manifestation
s of song, Eliza had driven a peckor two home through the bars, which, though they did not draw visibleblood, as I have said, probably taught Hortense that a Newport educationis not the only instruction which fits you for drawing-room war to theknife.
Her small reckoning was paid, and she had drawn on one long, tawnyglove. Even this act was a luxury to watch, so full it was of thefeminine, of the stretching, indolent ease that the flesh and the spiritof this creature invariably seemed to move with. But why didn't she go?This became my wonder now, while she slowly drew on the second glove.She was taking more time than it needed.
"Your flowers are for sale, too?"
This, after her silence, struck me as being something planned out afterher original plan. The original plan had finished with that secondassertion of her ownership of John (or, I had better say, of hisownership in her), that doubt she had expressed as to his being willingto consent to any further postponement of their marriage. Of course shehad expected, and got herself ready for, some thrust on the postponementsubject.
Eliza crossed from behind her counter to where the Exchange flowersstood on the opposite side of the room and took some of them up.
"But those are inferior," said Hortense. "These." And she touchedrightly the bowl in which my roses stood close beside Eliza's ledger.
Eliza paused for one second. "Those are not for sale."
Hortense paused, too. Then she hung to it. "They are so much the best."She was holding her purse.
"I think so, too," said Eliza. "But I cannot let any one have them."
Hortense put her purse away. "You know best. Shall you furnish usflowers as well as cake?"
Eliza's sweetness rose an octave, softer and softer. "Why, they haveflowers there! Didn't you know?"
And to this last and frightful peck through the bars Hortense found noretaliation. With a bow to Eliza, and a total oblivion of me, she wentout of the Exchange. She had flaunted "her" John in Eliza's face, shehad, as they say, rubbed it in that he was "her" John;--but was it sucha neat, tidy victory, after all? She had given away the last word toEliza, presented her with that poisonous speech which when translatedmeant:--
"Yes, he's 'your' John; and you're climbing up him into houses whereyou'd otherwise be arrested for trespass." For it was in one of thevarious St. Michael houses that the marriage would be held, owing to thenomadic state of the Rieppes.
Yes, Hortense had gone altogether too close to the cage at the end,and, in that repetition of her taunt about "furnishing" supplies for thewedding, she had at length betrayed something which her skill andthe intricate enamel of her experience had hitherto, and with entiresuccess, concealed--namely, the latent vulgarity of the woman. She waswearing, for the sake of Kings Port, her best behavior, her most knowingform, and, indeed it was a well-done imitation of the real thing; itwould last through most occasions, and it would deceive most people.But here was the trouble: she was wearing it; while, through the wholeencounter, Eliza La Heu had worn nothing but her natural and perfectdignity; yet with that disadvantage (for good breeding, alas!, is attimes a sort of disadvantage, and can be battered down and covered withmud so that its own fine grain is invisible) Eliza had, after a somewhatundecisive battle, got in that last frightful peck! But what had ledHortense, after she had come through pretty well, to lose her temperand thus, at the finish, expose to Eliza her weakest position? That herclothes were paid for by a Newport lady who had taken her to Worth, thather wedding feast was to be paid for by the bridegroom, these were notfacts which Eliza would deign to use as weapons; but she was marryinginside the doors of Eliza's Kings Port, that had never opened to admither before, and she had slipped into putting this chance into Eliza'shand--and how had she come to do this?
To be sure, my vision had been slow! Hortense had seen, through herthick veil, Eliza's interest in John in the first minute of her arrivalon the bridge, that minute when John had run up to Eliza after theautomobile had passed over poor General. And Hortense had not revealedherself at once, because she wanted a longer look at them. Well, she hadgot it, and she had got also a look at her affianced John when he was inthe fire-eating mood, and had displayed the conduct appropriate to 1840,while Charley's display had been so much more modern. And so first shehad prudently settled that awkward phosphate difficulty, and next shehad paid this little visit to Eliza in order to have the pleasure oftelling her in four or five different ways, and driving it in deep, andturning it round: "Don't you wish you may get him?"
"That's all clear as day," I said to myself. "But what does her loss oftemper mean?"
Eliza was writing at her ledger. The sweetness hadn't entirely gone; itwas too soon for that, and besides, she knew I must be looking at her.
"Couldn't you have told her they were my flowers?" I asked her at thecounter, as I prepared to depart. Eliza did not look up from her ledger."Do you think she would have believed me?"
"And why shouldn't--"
"Go out!" she interrupted imperiously and with a stamp of her foot."You've been here long enough!"
You may imagine my amazement at this. It was not until I had reachedMrs. Trevise's, and was sitting down to answer a note which had beenleft for me, that light again came. Hortense Rieppe had thought thoseflowers were from John Mayrant, and Eliza had let her think so.
Yes, that was light, a good bright light shed on the matter; but a stillmore brilliant beam was cast by the up-country bride when I came intothe dining-room. I told her myself, at once, that I had taken flowers toMiss La Heu; I preferred she should hear this from me before she learnedit from the smiling lips of gossip. It surprised me that she shouldimmediately inquire what kind of flowers?
"Why, roses," I answered; and she went into peals of laughter.
"Pray share the jest," I begged her with some dignity.
"Didn't you know," she replied, "the language that roses from a singlegentleman to a young lady speak in Kings Port?"
I stood staring and stiff, taking it in, taking myself, and Eliza, andHortense, and the implicated John, all in.
"Why, aivrybody in Kings Port knows that!" said the bride; and now mymirth rose even above hers.
