‘We’re talking of an awfully serious thing,’ said Maud. ‘It would mean living, you know, really living right along;’ and she scraped her palette softly as she talked, making a beautiful mixed tint of the spotty little dabs of burnt sienna, cadmium and terre vert. ‘There is no reason we should not do it though. But it ought to mean for life, and we’re not all going to be single, I hope.’
Beautiful Maud, with her pale, sweet, oval face and wealth of soft, glistening, chestnut hair, had seen her lover buried, and turned to her chosen art as a life-long companion. But, she could speak all the more earnestly to her heart free friends; though there was a tell-tale blush on pretty Mollie’s cheek, and Julia looked a little conscious as she spoke.
‘Well anyway,’ said the last named damsel, with rather a defiant tone; ‘if we do marry we don’t mean to give up our work I hope. I mean to marry some time, perhaps — but I don’t mean to cook! I mean to decorate always, and make lots of money and hire a housekeeper.’
‘I don’t see,’ said Mollie dimpling softly, ‘why that should be an obstacle. Couldn’t we have a house so big and beautiful and live so happily and get to be so famous that — that — if any one wanted to marry us they could come there too?’
‘What sort of compound fractions do you think we are?’ demanded Serena. ‘Any one marry us indeed! It would take five to marry us, Mollie!’
‘Now stop joking, girls,’ said Olive. ‘We are all grown and trained. We all want to always work — indeed, some of us have got to. Now, honestly, why shouldn’t we build a sort of apartment home you know, a beautiful “model tenement” affair, artistic and hygenic and esthetic and everything else; with central kitchens and all those things; and studios and rooms for ourselves, and a hall to exhibit in and so on. Then we could have suites of apartments for families and let them; and bye and bye, if we are families, we can occupy those ourselves and let the others!’
And Olive hugged the headless Victory in her enthusiasm while the girls applauded rapturously.
Then what a happy year they had before their course at the Institute was finished! Such innumerable plans and elevations; such glowing schemes of color, such torrents of design for carving and painting and modelling, such wild visions of decoration, where races and epochs and styles waltzed madly together in interminable procession.
The class work went on, of course, and Maud’s great picture won the first prize at the exhibition, though no one guessed that the lovely walls in the background were from one of Serena’s least practicable elevations, and that the group of girls in front were the future owners thereof. There was a troubadour in it also, but he was purely imaginary; though Maud did tell Mollie that he was the fortunate youth that was going to marry them.
It was but a year or two before the lovely plan came true, for after all there was nothing impossible in it. Between them all there was money enough to buy the lot and build the house, and the ‘families’ consented to hire apartments therein to such an extent as to furnish all the funds for running expenses.
Julia Morse’s redoubtable Aunt Susan came down from her New Hampshire home to keep house in the new mansion, and declared that she never had had half a chance to show what was in her before.
Olive’s widowed mother made the dearest of chaperones for the girls, and their long parlor rang with music and merriment on the pleasant winter evenings.
The studios were easy to let also, and the velveteen coat and loose blouse became as frequent in the long halls as the paint-daubed gingham apron. Also the troubadour materialized in the shape of a most angelic-voiced singing master, who occupied a room on the top floor; and who, though he did not marry them all, as was aforetime suggested, did marry Olive in due season and stayed in the same pleasant quarters thereafter. Only a ‘family’ was evicted, so to speak, for their convenience, and Olive’s room was let to an aspiring little sister of the troubadour.
Pretty Mollie followed suit in a few months more — it took some time to convince her devoted but conservative lover that they could just as well have a suite in this beautiful great home cluster as in a flat near the park. Every girl of them married, as years passed on; even Maud, who forgot her early sorrow in a newer, deeper joy.
But live together they did, and work together always, with various breaks and lapses, as the sweet home cares sometimes interfered with working hours, and the charming little kindergarten in the south wing grew fuller and fuller.
‘There’s nothing like planning things for life,’ said Olive one still June evening in after years, as the same five girls sat together on the rose shadowed porch; older, but no less earnest in their work and their love for each other.
‘That’s so,’ said Serena heartily — especially when you do the things you plan.’
ONE WAY OUT
SHE sat quite silent for a little after his last remark, with that silence which suggests the retention of many things most pertinent to the matter in hand, but not always of an agreeable nature.
Her cousin — she had quite returned to the old habit of thinking of him as a cousin, — regardless of the few weeks after their betrothal in which he had seemed to become luminous and large, a hero, a lover, such as one reads about. She had read about many, and delighted in the change from the old child love between them to this new feeling, half combined with, half separated from the first, yet so palpably another.
‘What’s the matter?’ he inquired lightly enough, yet with a certain suppressed anxiety in his voice. ‘It does seem, May, as if nothing I said suited you in these days. You used not to be so — captious — when we were just cousins.’
It was a trifle — the merest trifle, and of itself surely inadequate to send such a multitude of feelings to the heart of the hearer.
She made no sign of emotion however, beyond a quick look at the earnest yet boyish face beside her, with its rather petulant expression. In what way was it possible, she thought coldly, for this man to have become so — so distasteful, — in so short a time. She had had the warmest affection for him as a boy, and surely but a few short weeks ago she had had a love far warmer and of larger meaning. Now she groped hurriedly about in her heart for either feeling, and to her astonishment found only a pale sense of justice to the human creature by her side, whom she knew loved her, and who had done her no harm whatever, save for a hapless jarring on certain minor chords of her life, which perhaps she was foolish to so resent.
Then as she saw the disconsolate droop of his big shoulders, and noted how he sat over the fire and relieved his mind by carefully picking the perfectly arranged cannel coal into a score of flaming fragments, greatly to their mutual discomfort, two strong sensations rose uppermost. The one a sense of accumulated outrage based on no one act of discourtesy or forgetfulness; on nothing that was unworthy of her cousin or her lover, but that sweepingly admitted its inability to show just cause of offence and at the same time protested before high heaven that any man should be able to so trample on every minor peculiarity, so fail to apprehend, so perversely misapply, so succeed in distilling perpetual unrest into the cup of life he had but now lifted to her lips. The very talk they had been having — what had he said? Nothing in which any listener would find cause even for displeasure, yet which left her wrung and angry as from a bitter dispute. Then following this causeless rage, which raged the more at its own causelessness, came a great wave of ante-betrothal tenderness, the warm affection of her childhood for the big cousin who had always been so good to her. He was good to her now, he had never failed to be kind, tender, patient, self-sacrificing; there was nothing wrong except — except — ah yes, that was it. She had over-estimated his love and her own. They loved each other of course, and always would, but he was perfectly right in the speech that hurt her so just now — they were happier, she was less fretful and hard to please, when they were only cousins.
She rose and went to him, kneeling on the rug by his side, and laid one hand on his knee, the other about his neck.
‘Bert, dear,�
�� she said, ‘Do you know I think you’ve just hit it. I was nicer when we were only cousins, and so were you. Now don’t let’s be miserable or make any more mistakes as to how we feel. I love you dearly, as I always did, and you do me, I know. Nobody knows we were engaged and nobody need know why we aren’t; but really, Bert, I think we were both naturally mistaken — don’t you? Now, don’t be sulky, you dear boy. You’ll thank me some day, really. Come — let’s be just cousins again — and always.’
He rose to his feet without a word and began to walk up and down with his hands in his pockets and a puzzled frown on his brow. She watched him narrowly, feeling sure she should recognize any signs of pain, and with a queer tugging sort of wish that he would stop striding about, take his hands out of his pockets and come and take possession of her hands, as he did once; assure her that it was he who was wrong — that he had been a wretched failure so far, and that he wasn’t half good enough for her, but — and the tugging wish became an absolute cry for something of that look in his eyes which had so burned itself into hers a month or more ago.
But when he came and stood over her there was no such look visible, only a rueful sort of expression, and, she fancied a glimmer of relief. And what he said, — alas for the ineffable stupidity of the most considerate of men! dull creatures whose efforts to console and spare are often productive of quite the subtlest pangs in life, — what he said was only in tones of the tenderest compunction: ‘Are you sure you won’t care?’
He mistrusted that he had entered a frying pan the instant the words were uttered and precipitated himself nimbly into the fire by adding: ‘care too much, I mean!’
For one wild moment, she longed to hurt his honest heart by assuring him that it would not cost her a moment’s uneasiness; and truly what grief she had fled utterly, as she realized anew the utter misapprehension in which her life might have been passed had she failed to save them both from such mis-step.
‘Bert, you dear old, uncomplimentary goose! — it’s you who ought to be a mass of ruin, if you weren’t too visibly thankful at my being wise enough for two! Of course, I shall care some. A woman hates to make a mistake like that. But it’s well found out now, and you and I will always love each other dearly, as we always have. It’s all right, isn’t it? Come shake hands on the new cousinship, dear.’
He took her hand and held it a moment, saying with an unreliable voice: ‘May — you are the best friend a fellow ever had — I hope — I hope that you will find some one that is good enough for you!’
She looked at his perturbed countenance and broke into a little laugh.
‘Any one would think to hear you, Bert Howard, that I could not possibly sustain the state of single-cousinship without serious distress of mind. You are such a goose that I have a great mind to punish you.’
‘What will you do to me?’ he asked, standing with his back to the fire and looking down at her. The leaping flames which followed his unseemly use of the poker were brighter than the much draped lamp, whose profuse silken petticoats and copious laces gave somehow the impression of a skirt dance — motionless but suggestive. Her fair face, lit by the rosy flames, was turned up at him mockingly.
‘What will I do? I will upbraid you with being a feather-headed inconstant boy, deluding your pet cousin into the notion that she was fonder of you than is really the case. Or I would, if I were not so grateful to you for finding it out in time, and being so palpably miserable that I could not choose but see it?’
‘I was not miserable,’ he protested, flushing. ‘I was as happy as could be, only — you don’t imagine I wanted to get out of it, do you?’
‘No, indeed, I don’t!’ she hastily replied, ‘It is all right, dear boy; don’t feel badly. You didn’t do a thing but just what was natural under the circumstances. It is I who have found out that I do not feel as I did — that’s all. If you had acted like Uncle Chester, now, I never would have forgiven you!’
‘What did he do?’ demanded her listener.
‘Do? Why he found out there was insanity or something in the family of the girl he was engaged to, and just calmly broke it off. She found out the reason and went mad on the spot — lamentable corroboration of his theory, was it not? If I knew of any such danger as that, I’d never marry anybody — would you? But you and I come from the same people, so it’s as broad as it’s long. I wonder if you had had any notions about our family spectre, if you would have sought to escape me on good humanitarian grounds, instead of sticking closer than a brother till I found out how little I really cared — or you either.’
There was quite a silence at this, broken by her suddenly asking him if he enjoyed Dr Henderson’s lectures on ‘Consumption and Heredity.’
He looked up at her with an eager questioning glance quickly restrained.
‘That’s ours, you know,’ said she, ‘my poor mother and father and yours, — what do they say about the heredity, Bert?’
He drew himself up to his full height, assumed his most professional manner and informed her in choice scientific terminology that the latest theory was that only tendencies were transmissible and those could be overcome by education. He talked with great freedom and prolixity until she yawned behind her hand and sent him home.
‘It’s all very interesting,’ said she, ‘I’m glad you feel that way — I had really begun to feel horrid about it. Good night, Bert.’
‘Good night, May,’ he said, and kissed her very lightly.
She stood looking in the fire, the medical terms still ringing in her ears.
‘Too bad,’ she said, ‘I ought to have known better. He didn’t care except cousin fashion, nor I.’
He went home under the moonlight, over the snow. It was light enough, but very cold.
AN UNPATENTED PROCESS
OF course there was an alarming discrepancy between their characters — everybody could see that fast enough. They were about as well calculated to get along together as an eight-day clock and a California rainy season. She was accuracy itself; mathematics were no better than a weather bureau compared to her methods, and he — well a weather bureau was mathematics compared to his.
The things that fellow forgot, and left open, and untied, and hung in the wrong place, and misdirected, and over-drew and failed to connect, would shingle Tophet — supposing that the roof of that place has any analogy to its flooring. And her friends told her so, most freely, and with that brimming tenderness of regard and intense devotion to one’s best interests that prompts one’s friends on such occasions.
‘For a woman of your temperament,’ they told her, ‘it is suicide — rank suicide. You’ll die in a year of nervous exhaustion. He’ll put your bonnet in the butter dish, bring home preserved barberries when you order beans and buy you a piano lamp with the money you gave him to pay the coal bill. You’ll die, Nettie! No, don’t you do it.’
But Nettie Hines was not going to be deterred from marrying the man of her choice by any such paltry objections as these. Hers was a devotion such as you read about it in those beautiful stories of the troubadours. Had she been betrothed to him and he been converted in one of those revivals of Peter the Hermit, and gone off to lead a sanctified life in the Turk-and-Sepulchre line, she would have remained faithful to him for seventeen years, and never mentioned the little delay when he returned.
Whether she could have reached the summit of complacency of the lady who received not only her long absent and imprisoned lord, but also the beautiful and infatuated sultaness who delivered him, I do not know, but she was never put to that kind of a test. Hank Richardson was not that sort of a man, not by a long chalk. He had just as good stuff in him as she had, in his way; and was as faithful as that fellow with the barrel hoops around him in the fairy story. He wouldn’t have brought home a sultaness under any consideration whatever, — not if he was engaged to be married to Nettie Hines.
So she stuck to it that she would marry him, and marry him she did, in spite of a few characteristic vicissitudes on the oc
casion of the nuptial ceremonies. You see, he was a doctor, and a real good one; he never slipped up on a case when he once got his mind on it. Hank’s mind was a regular sleuth-hound for following the idea he was after; but if he lost the scent anywhere he’d just run around and paw the air and howl — it was really pitiful. They tried to get married two or three times, but Hank slipped up on it, and it was awfully mortifying to Nettie. But she made up her mind to have him, and she did. The first time he was more excusable, because of not having had any experience, and perhaps not rightly appreciating the importance a young girl attaches to a little matter of ceremony like that.
Women are so much more sensitive to these social minutiae than men are. It was an outrageous storm that night, there’s no denying it; and living as they did, in the country, it was difficult and really somewhat dangerous to get around.
The minister got there all right; it meant something to him of course in the way of direct returns; and the guests arrived in great numbers — country people don’t mind a little weather when it’s a question of sociability — but Hank never showed up at all. So after awhile Nettie’s brothers set out to look for his body, knowing that he was no hand to drive, and more than likely had gone off in some other direction, and might have made a mistake and harnessed the blind plough horse, and perhaps even then be lying stark and cold in some sheeted drift by the roadside. They went clear to his house, to find out when he started, and Hank came down and opened the door, half dressed.
‘Man alive, what are you doin’ here!’ said they.
‘Doin’?’ said he, ‘why goin’ to bed of course. It’s time.’
Complete Works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman Page 148
