She dismissed me with that, but as I was passing through the door, she said, “Hope returns tomorrow. I fancy she’ll come in about tea time.”
“I am anxious to meet her.”
Miss Pride looked directly into my eyes. “I am sure you are,” she said. “I have the feeling that you have a preconceived notion of my niece.”
“I saw her once, you know. She came to the Hotel some years ago. Perhaps you don’t remember.”
“My life has not been so helter-skelter that I do not remember its events, Sonie,” she replied. “Nor have I forgotten Hopestill’s dancing slippers.”
A blush raced to the roots of my hair and my voice broke as I said, “My father didn’t finish them.”
She smiled wrily. “Hope refused to go to the party without them. I dare say if you had known that she spent that evening in her room, howling for her slippers, you would have sent them on.” But while she twisted her dagger in me, her smile changed to one of great friendliness and she added, “The battle must begin early in our lives if we are to be victorious, isn’t that right?”
2
I had dressed with care, but although I had been leisurely, I had a full hour before I could go down. Miss Pride had told me that she had no intention of “presenting” me, that I was merely to appear and “take things as they came.” It would be better, she told me, not to be too prompt. I moved impatiently about my room, sat at my desk awhile and read one sentence over and over in The Rise of Silas Lapham without ever comprehending its meaning. Moving to the window, I sat for a while on the ledge, shivering at the icy air that came through the cracks, and stared at a boy, dressed like a Harvard student, loping up Mount Vernon Street across the square. Something in his carriage reminded me of Nathan. Without any transitional thought, I turned back into my room and standing, one arm on the foot rail of my bed, I opened The Confessions of a Young Man. When I had promised myself, on the night Nathan and I sat in the fog on the steps of the Hotel Barstow, that I would have the best, I had allowed destiny to choose the circumstances for me. I had at no time doubted that the choice of Boston by my guardian angel had been supreme wisdom, that this was the soil in which my gifts, whatever they were, would fructify. And thus, when I read George Moore, and I read him constantly, I did so out of the desire to prove to myself that the “best” Nathan had wanted for himself and for me was in reality only second best. My talents were not artistic, not creative. I felt that they were assimilative and analytical, that what I saw in Boston, what I had seen in Chichester I understood, but that I could not reassemble my impressions into something artful. I could not ennoble fact. It was experience of the most complex order that I desired, and while there were times when, exploring the narrow streets of the back side of the Hill, I wished my knowledge to include the cafés and ateliers and the quays of George Moore’s Paris, the wish was diluted as I turned toward home and thought of my room, of Miss Pride, and of our conversation over the sherry glasses. She, I thought, was worth all the freedom and all the abandon, worth, indeed, all triumphs.
I closed the book. Opening the door, I heard many voices rising up, and I knew it was time.
A dozen people were already drinking tea when I went into the drawing-room and were deep in conversation so that my entrance passed unnoticed save by an elderly gentleman, seated upon an ottoman though his years should have got him an easy chair. He rose at once and came toward me, fumbling in his coat pocket. “Hello, there!” he cried. When he had got midway and had put his eyeglasses on, he halted and said, “Oh, I thought you were Hope.”
“No, sir, I’m Sonie Marburg.”
He murmured something like “Well, that’s nice,” or “Well, I declare,” but kindly offered me his hand anyhow, though he did not come nearer and I was obliged to go after it. I should have liked to prolong our handclasp since his plump fingers were warm, and I was chilled to the bone after this first day of cold weather in the Spartan temperature of Miss Pride’s house. As I had come down the stairs just now where drafts blew out of the very walls, I had had to stop several times to rub my stiffening fingers together and to check the clatter of my teeth. But the weatherproof Bostonians, seated in the drawing-room which was not perceptibly warmer than the upper floors, were not only comfortable so that their bright cheeks glowed with excellent circulation, indeed, they had even suffered someone to “crack” a window through which came an unflagging blast of late fall air.
The old man’s fingers abandoned mine too soon. He introduced himself as Admiral Nephews and then returned to his ottoman, leaving me where I had been intercepted, still faced with the problem of what to do with myself. I felt that I was undergoing a radical physical transformation and was sure that if I could look at my feet (I was prevented by the unshakeable rigidity of my neck) I would find them twice their normal size and that my hands, pendulous at my sides, had likewise doubled their proportions, while my neck and face were suffused with a rashy red. I was further certain that if I were called upon to speak, my voice would issue either croaking or inaudible. I was rescued by a sign from Miss Pride who, lifting neither a finger nor an eyebrow nor speaking my name, commanded me to come directly to the tea-table where she was officiating. So peremptory was her aspect which alone had beckoned me, as it had done in the dining-room of the Barstow, that had I been in the middle of a sentence or had someone been in the middle of one addressed to me, I should instantly have obeyed her.
“Take charge for a while,” she said when I came to her. “I must speak to someone.” Then, bending over as if to inspect the plate of lemon slices, she said in a much lower voice, “I think you should be more sparing of lip rouge.” This was by no means the first reproof I had received since I had been in Boston. She had taken it upon herself to civilize me, or, as she called it, to “caulk” me, for, she said, not even the sturdiest vessel could weather such storms as I had without some damage. The “storms” were not so much the facts of my father’s desertion, my brother’s death, my mother’s calamity, as they were the omissions in my upbringing. She had sent me out when I first arrived to buy my winter wardrobe and when I had returned with what had struck my fancy, she had at once sent for her car, taken me and all my purchases back to the shops and chosen my clothes herself. For, although I had bought four pairs of gloves, I had not bought a hat, and although the coat I had picked out was a formal Chesterfield, my shoes were all flat-heeled oxfords.
Out of sorts with the cold, terrified by the roomful of people, I might have risen at her criticism—not from resentment but from despair—and left the house had not Miss Pride immediately retired, placing in my hands the custody of the tea-table, and allowing me, by her quick departure, no time to worry my smart into a real state of mind. I was quite bewildered by the array of shining vessels before me and especially nonplussed at the sight of three pots of about the same size, any one of which might contain tea. Before I had time to lift up their lids to determine what was inside, the old man who had mistaken me for Hope Mather tottered up and extended his cup, winking so broadly that one whole side of his face was stitched up, and saying in a humorous stage whisper, “It’s my fourth! I thought I’d get my refill when Lucy wasn’t here, what?” I chose the wrong pot and filled his cup with hot water.
“Here, here!” he cried, laughing and turning away from me. “I say, Lucy! Did you tell this young lady here to give me water if I asked for any more tea? That’s a good one! It’s like the orderly I had on the California. He liked his gin, that chap. Well, ma’am, he drank so much of it that towards the end of an evening, his mates used to slip a bottle of water in front of him and if he said it tasted queer, those rascals told him his taste buds were paralyzed!”
By the sparse but indulgent laughter that followed the mild little anecdote, recited loud enough for anyone to hear, I judged that it was not a new one, and that the interest which lighted up the eyes of all the guests was not in the story-teller, but in myself who had been disc
overed, as if by accident, within the Admiral’s orbit. Miss Pride alone did not laugh. She stood by the door to the dining-room, and it was only after she had transfixed me with a gaze of exasperation for my mistake, that she attended to what she had gone for and rang the bell for a servant. The others resumed their talk, but now and then stole a tactful look at me, pretending to be glancing at the portrait on the wall behind the sofa where I sat or to be merely making sure that the Admiral was still there.
“I beg your pardon,” I said to him. “I really didn’t intend to do it.” I filled a new cup with tea and handed it up but neglected to offer him any accessories. “Oh, come, dear girl,” he said, “you’re treating me shabbily. I take two of sugar and copious cream. You youngsters these days don’t believe much in tea, what? It’s all cocktails for you, what? I remember, ma’am, that when I was a boy I had carving lessons and my sisters had lessons in the technique of the tea-table. Don’t they teach that any more?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“Where did you go to school, mademoiselle?”
“In Chichester.”
“I didn’t know there was a school in Chichester. I didn’t know there was anything in Chichester except those humdinger cherry-stones and that scuttled hotel Miss Lucy Pride risks her life in every summer. Was it day or boarding?”
“It was a public school,” I said apologetically.
“Oh!” said Admiral Nephews, drawing up a chair. “I dare say you wouldn’t get anything fancy there. Perhaps it’s just as well. Perhaps we all learned folderol, who knows? I expect you had practical things like manual training and geology, what?”
“Why, no, I think we had the usual things.”
“Latin, I suppose. I guess Arma virumque cano isn’t Greek to you!” He chuckled, wrinkling up his pleasant, rosy face. “And French. Everyone does a good deal of French. I did. It’s a good thing. One goes to Paris after all and doesn’t want to look like a booby. And English? You’re up on your English, I wager. Let’s test you. Now I’ll give you a fleet of quotations and you tell me what they’re from. Ready? First:
Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Well?”
“Shakespeare,” I said, but in a voice that shook with dread of his more difficult questions. “It’s the beginning of one of the sonnets.”
“Good! Second:
When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state.”
“That’s Shakespeare, too,” I said.
“Where do the lines occur?”
“In a sonnet, sir!”
“Good! Good! Excellent! Once more:
That time of year thou may’st in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang.”
“Shakespeare!” I cried, hoping he did not intend to go through the whole sequence.
“I’ll give you E for excellence, young lady. But now I think I may be able to stump you. Try this one:
She shall be sportive as the fawn
That wild with glee across the lawn
Or up the mountain springs:
And hers shall be the breathing balm
And hers the silence and the calm
Of mute, insensate things.”
My luck continued, for in the year past I had learned my English from an effusive woman whose adoration of Wordsworth had made her give all the rest of literature nothing more than a lick and a promise while upon her exegesis of Ode on Intimations of Immortality and The Prelude she had spent nearly six months.
“Bravo!” cried the Admiral, putting his hand on my knee and continuing confidentially, “Do you know that I committed every line of those Lucy poems to memory in honor of Miss Pride? Perhaps she’ll tell you some time how I recited them to her in this very room on the occasion of her twenty-fifth birthday. You may not see this in her, but I still think of her as just what the poem says, ‘as sportive as the fawn.’ ”
The garrulous creature’s eyes were dewy and I wondered if he had been a rejected suitor, for I was sure that if he had been a suitor, Miss Pride would have rejected him straightaway after his recitation of the Lucy poems. She must have been born hard-headed, I thought, and at the substantial age of twenty-five would have given anyone what-for who compared her to a “sportive fawn.” The fawn herself was moving in and out amongst her guests and there was in her carriage such a vigorous uprightness, and in her face, from which her exasperation with me was not altogether obliterated, so formidable an aloofness that I was on the point of laughing out loud at the old man’s metaphor. As she halted before each of the little groups, I observed that she treated her friends with very little more warmth than she did me or her chauffeur. She did not bend towards them, but stood erect, looking down upon the interrupted talkers and perhaps rewarding them with a cool smile. Her smile had about it the same economy that had her speech and her eating habits and her apparel. I do not mean that she lacked either cordiality or humor and no doubt she was genuinely fond of many of the people gathered here. But she was never, so to speak, surprised into a smile, and she allowed her smile to last only so long as it was justified by the nature of its provocation. I noticed, however, that she was not the only one who husbanded her responses, for often one of her guests cracked open and resealed his mouth as perfunctorily as she. I admired their abstention, regarding it as a kind of hallmark of the Puritans, like the haemophilia of the Bourbons. I had noticed, from the beginning, that Miss Pride was extremely frugal of her laughter. Now and again, she was amused enough to emit two muted barks of the same volume and duration, as if she were actually saying “Ha! ha!”
As Admiral Nephews followed her course with his nautical eyes, I warmed towards him for no other reason than that he admired her, and had not the very nature of my own admiration insisted upon discipline as its principal component, I would have exclaimed, “Isn’t she wonderful!” in order to hear his corroboration. She was, in truth, more wonderful today than she had ever been. Although her guests were as pedigreed as she, and no doubt owned the famous names I had read on the calling cards, she outshone them all just as she had outshone Mrs. Prather and Mrs. McKenzie. Her preeminence came partly from the mere fact that she was the hostess and therefore the star performer, but even more from the noblesse oblige with which she had turned me loose in her drawing-room despite my over-painted lips. A lesser lady would have sent me back to my bedroom to remove the rouge lest my bad taste reflect upon herself.
The Admiral, having satisfied himself that I was tolerably educated, did not inquire further into my background but after congratulating both me and himself on our learning (for he found it as remarkable that he, an officer of the navy, was versed in poetry as that I, educated at a public school, was) said, “Hope Mather would have known them all, too. She’s a clever one! I heard she was coming home today. Where is she?”
I told him she was riding horseback in Concord where she had spent the night, having only just come back from Manchester. Thus far, I had not seen her.
“Now there’s a girl that can ride a horse. I suppose she’s the best horsewoman I know barring Mrs. Nephews, who was perhaps a shade more prudent. I well recollect when Spencer Mather’s daughter was no higher than a table, she managed a two-year-old that Mr. Apthorp had in Bedford. She was a caution! She had a way with the groom, that little spitfire had, and she got him to saddle the horse that wasn’t really broken yet, and before a fellow could say Jack Robinson, milady was on the horse and out of the stable, riding him into the ring. We were just coming back to tea—I expect we had ridden to Carlisle that day—and what did we see but that red-headed baggage putting the colt through his paces. When he frisked too much for her taste, she
gave him his comeuppance with a whack over the nose with her little crop no longer than my forearm. She sat like a lady! Well, ma’am, while Spencer Mather was giving the groom a piece of his mind, the governess was leading Hope away and I believe” (the Admiral, overcome with laughter, could not go on for a moment), “I believe she must have been living in the stables for the vocabulary she used on that poor little Parisian spinster. It was too funny, you know! Hope swearing to beat the band while the little mademoiselle was crossing herself. I dare say Hope doesn’t remember those words now!”
After a few concluding chuckles, he sobered and went on to list Hope’s further accomplishments. I gathered that she not only “sat a horse well” and “knew a good mount” when she saw one and had numerous other equestrian talents, but that she was an excellent swimmer (the statistics of the length of time she could stay under water, the distances she had swum, and the sensational dives she had executed, were quite lost to me who could not swim), could not be defeated on the tennis court, and was a girl who could jibe her boat into a sixty-mile-an-hour breeze with the skill of a veteran mariner. Indeed, what the girl could not do, he, for one, didn’t know. “Why, she could milk a cow if she was asked to!”
Since he apparently knew her family well, I wanted to inquire of him whether Hopestill was descended from the famous Mathers, but I had no opportunity, for his praise of her athletic exploits led him to tell me about his grandson who was a lieutenant commander, stationed in Hawaii and who was also “no slouch” on a horse. It was the Admiral’s dream that through this young man, Hope might be annexed to the Nephews family. “But neither party,” he said with a sigh, “seems to want my will to be done.”
I said, “Perhaps that’s because they’re so far separated?”
Boston Adventure Page 29
