Who Cares? A Story of Adolescence
Page 14
VIII
Mr. and Mrs. George Harley had made an appointment to meet at half-pasteleven sharp on the doorstep of the little house in Sixty-seventhStreet. Business had interrupted their honeymoon and brought themunexpectedly to New York. Harley had come by subway from Wall Street tothe Grand Central and taken a taxicab. It was twelve o'clock before hearrived. Nevertheless he wore a smile of placid ease of mind. Hislittle wife had only to walk from the Plaza, it was true, but he knew,although a newly married man, that to be half an hour late was to beten minutes early.
At exactly five minutes past twelve he saw her turn off the Avenue, andas he strolled along to meet her, charmed and delighted by herdaintiness, proud and happy at his possession of her, he did a thingthat all wise and tactful husbands do--he forced back an irresistibledesire to be humorous at her expense and so won an entry of approvalfrom the Recording Angel.
If they had both been punctual they would have seen Martin go off inhis car to drive the girl who had had no luck to the trees and the wildflowers and the good green earth.
Joan's mother, all agog to see the young couple who had taken life intotheir own hands with the sublime faith of youth, had made it her firstduty to call, however awkward and unusual the hour. Her choice of hatsin which to do so had been a matter of the utmost importance.
They were told that Mr. Gray had gone out of town, that Mrs. Gray wasnot yet awake and followed the butler upstairs to the drawing-room witha distinct sense of disappointment. The room still quivered under theemotion of Gilbert Palgrave.
Rather awkwardly they waited to be alone. Butlers always appear toresent the untimely visitation of relations. Sunlight poured in throughthe windows. It was a gorgeous morning.
"Well," said George Harley, "I've seen my brokers and can do nothingmore to-day. Let the child have her sleep out. I'm just as happy to behere with you, Lil, as anywhere else." And he bent over his wife as ifhe were her lover, as indeed he was, and kissed her pretty ear. Hisclothes were very new and his collar the shade of an inch too high forcomfort and his patent leather shoes something on the tight side, butthe spirits of the great lovers had welcomed him and were unafraid.
He won a most affectionate and grateful smile from the neat little ladywhose brown hair was honestly tinged with white, and whose unlined facewas innocent of make-up. Mrs. Harley had not yet recovered from herastonishment at having been swept to the altar after fifteen years ofwidowhood by this most simple and admirable man. Even then she was notquite sure that she was not dreaming all this. She patted his big handand would have put her head against his chest if the brim of her hathad permitted her to do so.
"That's very sweet of you, Geordie," she said. "How good you are to me."
He echoed the word "Good!" and laughed and waved his hands. It was thegesture of a man whose choice of ready words was not large enough todescribe all that he longed and tried to be to her. And then he stoodback with his long legs wide apart and his large hands thrust into hispockets and his rather untidy gray head stuck on one side and studiedher as if she were a picture in a gallery. He looked like a great bigfaithful St. Bernard dog.
Mrs. Harley didn't think so. He seemed to her to be the boy of whom shehad dreamed in her first half-budding dreams and who had gone wanderingand come under the hand of Time, but remained a boy in his heart. Shewas glad that she had made him change his tie. She loved those deepcuts in his face.
"Very well, then," she said. "Although it is twelve o'clock I'll lether sleep another half an hour." And then she stopped with a little cryof dismay, "Let her! ... I'm forgetting that it's no longer in my powerto say what she's to do or not to do!"
"How's that?"
"She's no longer the young, big-eyed, watchful child who startled us bysaying uncanny things. She's no longer the slip of a thing that I leftwith her grandparents, with her wistful eyes on the horizon. She's amarried woman, Geordie, with a house of her own, and it isn't for me to'let' her do anything or tell her or even ask her. She can do what shelikes now. I've lost her, Geordie."
"Why, how's that, Lil?" There was surprise as well as sympathy inHarley's voice. He had only known other people's children.
She went on quickly, with a queer touch of emotion. "The inevitablechange has come before I've had time to realize it. It's a shock. Ittakes my breath away. I feel as if I had been set adrift from ananchor. Instead of being my little girl she's my daughter now. I'm nolonger 'mammy.' I'm mother. Isn't it,--isn't it wonderful? It's likestanding under a mountain that's always seemed to be a little hillmiles and miles away. From now on I shall be the one to be told to dothings, I shall be the child to be kept in order. It's a queer momentin the life of a mother, Geordie."
She laughed, but she didn't catch her tears before they were halfwaydown her cheeks. "I'm an old lady, my dear."
Harley gave one of his hearty, incredulous laughs. "You, old. You'reone of the everlasting young ones, you are, Lil," and he stood andbeamed with love and admiration.
"But I've got you, Geordie," she added, and her surprised heart thathad suddenly felt so empty warmed again and was soothed when he tookher hand eagerly and pressed it to his lips.
Grandfather and Grandmother Ludlow, Joan and many others who had formedthe habit of believing that Christopher Ludlow's widow would remaintrue to his memory, failed utterly to understand the reason for hersudden breakaway from a settled and steady routine, to plunge intobelated matrimony with a self-made man of fifty-five who seemed to themto be not only devoid of all attractiveness but bourgeois and ratherridiculous. But why? A little sympathy, a little knowledge of humannature,--that's all that was necessary to make this romanceunderstandable. Because it was romance, in the best sense of that muchabused word. It was not the romance defined in the dictionary as anaction or adventure of an unusual or wonderful character, soaringbeyond the limits of fact and real life and often of probability, butthe result of loneliness and middle age, and of two hearts starving forlove and the expression of love, for sympathy, companionship and thenatural desire for something that would feed vanity, which, if it ispermitted to die, is replaced by bitterness and a very warped point ofview.
Christopher Ludlow, a wild, harum-scarum fellow who had risked his lifemany times during his hunting trips, came to his death in a prosaicstreet accident. For fifteen years his widow, then twenty-five, livedin the country with his parents and his little daughter. She was attheir mercy, because Christopher had left no money. He had beendependent on an allowance from his father. Either she lived with themand bore cheerfully and tactfully with their increasing crotchetinessand impatience of old age, or left them to eke out a purposely smallincome in a second-rate hotel or a six by six apartment barely on theedge of the map. A timid woman, all for peace, without the grit andcourage that goes with self-direction, she pursued the easy policy ofleast resistance, sacrificed her youth on the altar of Comfort anddwindled with only a few secret pangs into middle age. From time totime, with Joan, she left the safe waters of Lethe and put an almostfrightened foot into the swift main stream. As time went on and Springwent out of her and Summer ripened to maturity, she was more and moreglad to return from these brief excursions to the quiet country and thesafe monotonous round. Then the day came when her no longer little girlcame finally out of school, urgent and rebellious, kicking against thepricks, electrically alive and eager, autocrat and individualist rolledinto one. Catching something of this youthfulness and shocked to waketo a realization of her lost years, she made a frantic and despairingeffort to grasp at the tail-end of Summer and with a daughter far moreworldly than herself escaped as frequently as possible into town totaste the pleasures that she had almost forgotten, and revive under theinfluence of the theater and the roar of life. It was during one ofthese excursions, while Joan was lunching with Alice Palgrave, that shecaught an arrow shot at random by that mischievous little devil Cupid,which landed plum in the middle of a heart that had been placid solong. In getting out of a taxicab she had slipped and fallen, wasraised deferentially to he
r feet, and looked up to catch the lonely andbewildered eyes of George Harley. They were outside their mutual hotel.What more natural and courteous than that he should escort her into thehotel with many expressions of anxious regret, ascend with her in theelevator to their mutual floor, linger with her for a polite fewminutes in the sunlight that poured through the passage windows andleave her to hurry finally to her room thrilling under the recollectionof two admiring eyes and a lingering handshake? She, even she, then, ather time of life, plump and partridge-like as she was, could inspirethe interest and approval of a man. It was wonderful. It was absurd. Itwas ... altogether too good to be true! Later, after she had spent ahalf-amused, half-wistful quarter of an hour in front of her glass,seeing inescapable white hairs and an irremediable double chin, she hadgone down to the dining room for lunch. All the tables being occupied,what more natural or disconcerting than for this modern Raleigh to riseand rather clumsily and eagerly beg that she would share the one justallotted to himself.
To the elderly man, whose nose had been too close to the grindstone topermit of dalliance, and who now, monied and retired, found himselfterribly alone in the pale sun of St. Martin's Summer, and to thelittle charming woman of forty, led back to life by an ardent andimpetuous girl, this quite ordinary everyday incident, which seemed tothem to be touched by romance, came at a moment when both werepathetically receptive. They arranged to meet again, they met again,and one fine afternoon while Joan was at a theater with Alice, he spokeand she listened. It was in the more than usually hotel-likedrawing-room of their mutual hotel. People were having tea, and theband was playing. There was a jangle of voices, the jingle of a musicalcomedy, the movement of waiters. Under the leaves of a tame palm whichonce had known the gorgeous freedom of a semi-tropical forest hestumbled over a proposal, the honest, fearful, pulsating proposal of aman who conceived that he was trying hopelessly to hitch his wagon to astar, and she, tremulous, amazed, and on the verge of tears, acceptedhim. Hers presumably the dreadful ordeal of facing an incredulousdaughter and two sarcastic parents-in-law and his of standing forjudgment before them,--argument, discussion, satire, irony, abuseeven,--a quiet and determined marriage and a new and beautiful life.
"What a delightful room," said Mrs. Harley. "It looks so comfortablefor a drawing-room that it must have been furnished by a man."
"We'll have a house in town by October, around here, and I'll bet itwon't be uncomfortable when you've finished with it."
The raucous shouts of men crying an "extra" took Harley quickly to theopen window. He watched one scare-monger edge his way up one side ofthe street and another, whose voice was like the jagged edge of a rustysaw, bandy leg his way up the other side. "Sounds like big sea battle,"he said, after listening carefully. "Six German warships sunk, fiveBritish. Horrible loss of life. But I may be wrong. These men do theirbest not to be quite understood. Only six German ships! I wish thewhole fleet of those dirty dogs could be sunk to the bottom."
There was nothing neutral or blind-eyed about George Harley. He hadfollowed all the moves that had forced the war upon the nations whosespineless and inefficient governments had so long been playing thepolicy of the ostrich. He had nothing but detestation for the vile andruthless methods of the German war party and nation and nothing butcontempt for the allied politicians who had made such methods possible.He had followed the course of the war with pain, anguish and batedbreath, thrilling at the supreme bravery of the Belgians and theFrench, and the First Hundred Thousand, thanking God for the miraclethat saved Paris from desecration, and paying honest tribute to thegiant effort of the British to wipe out the stain of a scandalous andcriminal unpreparedness. He had squirmed with humiliation at theattempts of the little, dreadful clever people of his owncountry,--professors, parsons, pacifists and pro-Germans,--to provethat it was the duty of the United States to stand aloof and unmoved inthe face of a menace which affected herself in no less a degree than itaffected the nations then fighting for their lives, and had watchedwith increasing alarm the fatuous complacency of Congress whichcontinued to deceive itself into believing that a great stretch of merewater rendered the country immune from taking its honest part in itsown war. "Oh, my God," he had said in his heart, as all clear-sightedAmericans had been saying, "has commercialism eaten into our veryvitals? Has the good red blood of the early pioneers turned to water?Are we without the nerve any longer to read the writing on the wall?"And the only times that his national pride had been able to raise itshead beneath the weight of shame and foreboding were those when hepassed the windows of Red Cross Depots and caught sight of a roomful ofgood and noble women feverishly at work on bandages; when he read ofthe keen and splendid training voluntarily undergone by the far-sightedmen who were making Plattsburg the nucleus of an officers' trainingcorps, when he was told how many of his young and red-bloodedfellow-countrymen had taken up arms with the Canadian contingents orhad slipped over to France as ambulance men. What would he not havegiven to be young again!
He heaved a great sigh and turned back to the precious little woman whohad placed her life into his hands for love. The hoarse alarming voicesreceded into the distance, leaving their curious echo behind.
"What were we talking about?" he asked. "Oh, ah, yes. The house. Lil,during the few days that I have to be in the city, let's find thehouse, let's nose around and choose the roof under which you and I willspend all the rest of our honeymoon. What do you say, dear?"
"I'd love it, Geordie; I'd just love it. A little house, smaller thanthis, with windows that catch the sun, quite near the Park, so that wecan toddle across and watch the children playing. Wouldn't that benice? And now I think I'll ring for some one to show me Joan's room andcreep in and suggest that she gets up."
But there was no need. The door opened, and Joan came in, with eyeslike stars.