“Lovely,” Mrs. Dodge agreed. “Yet I don’t see how it proves Mr. Battle has a feminine mind.”
“Oh, but I don’t mean just that alone,” Mrs. Battle returned eagerly. “It’s the thousand and one things in my daily contact with him that prove it. Of course, I know how hard it must be for other women to understand. I suppose no one could hope to realize what Mr. Battle’s mind is like at all without the great privilege of being married to him.”
“And that,” Mrs. Cromwell remarked, “has been denied to so many of us, my dear!”
Mrs. Dodge laughed a little brusquely, but the consort of the marvellous Battle was herself so marvellous that she merely looked preoccupied. “I know,” she said, gravely, while Mrs. Dodge and Mrs. Cromwell stared with widening eyes, first at her and then at each other. “How often I’ve thought of it!” she went on, her own eyes fixed earnestly upon the distance where, in perspective, the two curbs of the long, straight street appeared to meet. “It grows stranger and stranger to me how such a miracle could have happened to a commonplace little woman like me! I never shall understand why I should have been the one selected.”
Thereupon, having arrived at her own gate, it was with this thought that she left them. From the gate a path of mottled flagstones led through a smooth and snowy lawn to a house upon which the architect had chastely indulged his Latin pleasure in stucco and wrought iron; and as Mrs. Battle took her way over the flagstones she received from her two friends renewed congratulations upon her essay, as well as expressions of parting endearment; and she replied to these cheerfully; but all the while the glowing, serious eyes of the eager little brown-haired woman remained preoccupied with the miracle she had mentioned.
Mrs. Cromwell and Mrs. Dodge went on their way with some solemnity, and were silent until the closing door of the stucco house let them know they were out of earshot. Then Mrs. Cromwell, using a hushed voice, inquired: “Do you suppose she ever had a painting made of the Annunciation?”
“The Annunciation?” Mrs. Dodge did not follow her.
“Yes. When the miracle was announced to her that she should be the wife of Roderick Brooks Battle. Of course, she must have been forewarned by an angel that she was ‘the one selected.’ If Battle had just walked in and proposed to her it would have been too much for her!”
“I know one thing,” Mrs. Dodge said, emphatically. “I’ve stood just about as much of her everlasting ‘Mr. Battle says’ as I intend to! You can’t go anywhere and get away from it; you can hear it over all the chatter at a dinner; you can hear it over fifty women gabbing at a tea— ‘Mr. Battle says this,’
‘Mr. Battle says that,’
‘Mr. Battle says this and that’! When Belloni was singing at the Fortnightly Afternoon Music last week you could hear her ‘Mr. Battle says’ to all the women around her, even during that loud Puccini suite, and she treed Belloni on his way out, after the concert, to tell him Mr. Battle’s theory of music. She hadn’t listened to a note the man sang, and Belloni understands about two words of English, but Amelia kept right on Mr. Battle-says-ing him for half an hour! For my part, I’ve had all I can stand of it, and I’m about ready to do something about it!”
“I don’t see just what one could do,” Mrs. Cromwell said, laughing vaguely.
“I do!” her companion returned. Then both were silent for a few thoughtful moments and wore the air of people who have introduced a subject upon which they are not yet quite warm enough to speak plainly. Mrs. Cromwell evidently decided to slide away from it, for the time being, at least. “I don’t think Amelia’s looking well,” she said. “She’s rather lost her looks these last few years, I’m afraid. She seems pretty worn and thin to me; — she’s getting a kind of skimpy look.”
“What else could you expect? She’s made herself the man’s slave ever since they were married. She was his valet, his cook, and his washerwoman night and day for years. I wonder how many times actually and literally she’s blacked his boots for him! How could you expect her not to get worn out and skimpy looking?”
“Oh, I know,” Mrs. Cromwell admitted; “but all that was in their struggling days, and she certainly doesn’t need to do such things now. I hear he has twenty or thirty houses to build this year, and just lately an immense contract for two new office buildings. Besides, he’s generous with her; she dresses well enough nowadays.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Dodge said, grimly. “They’d both see to that for his credit; but if he comes in with wet feet you needn’t tell me she doesn’t get down on her knees before him and take off his shoes herself. I know her! Yes, and I know him, too! Rich or poor, she’d be his valet and errand girl just the same as she always was.”
“Perhaps,” said Mrs. Cromwell. “But it seems to me her most important office for him is the one she’s just been filling.”
“Press agent? I should say so! She may stop blacking his boots, but she’ll never stop that. It’s just why she makes me so confounded tired, too! She thinks she’s the only woman that ever got married!”
“Amelia is rather that way,” the other said, musingly. “She certainly never seems to realize that any of the rest of us have husbands of our own.”
“‘Mr. Battle can’t be comprehended from knowing other men!’” Here Mrs. Dodge somewhat bitterly mimicked the unfortunate Amelia’s eager voice. “‘Other men look at things in simply a masculine way!’
‘I know how hard it must be for other women to understand a god like my husband just from knowing their own poor little imitation husbands!’”
“Oh, no,” Mrs. Cromwell protested. “She didn’t quite say that.”
“But isn’t it what she meant? Isn’t it exactly what she felt?”
“Well — perhaps.”
“It does make me tired!” Mrs. Dodge said, vigorously, and with the repetition she began to be more than vigorous. Under the spell of that rancour which increases in people when they mull over their injuries, she began to be indignant. “For one thing, outside of the shamelessness of it, some of the rest of us could just possibly find a few enthusiastic things to say of our husbands if we didn’t have some regard for not boring one another to death! I’ve got a fairly good husband of my own I’d like to mention once in a while, but—”
“But, of course, you’ll never get the chance,” Mrs. Cromwell interrupted. “Not if Amelia’s in your neighbourhood when you attempt it.”
“What I can’t understand, though,” Mrs. Dodge went on, “is her never having the slightest suspicion what a nuisance it is. I should think the man himself would stop her.”
But Mrs. Cromwell laughed and shook her head, “in the first place, of course, he agrees with her. He thinks Amelia’s just stating facts — facts that ought to be known. In the second, don’t you suppose he understands how useful her press-agenting is to him?”
“But it isn’t. It makes us all sick of him.”
“Oh, it may have that effect on you and me, Lydia, but I really wonder—” Mrs. Cromwell paused, frowning seriously, then continued: “Of course, he’d never take such a view of it. He instinctively knows it’s useful, but he’d never take the view of it that—”
“The view of it that what?” Mrs. Dodge inquired, as her friend paused again.
“Why, that it may be actually the principal reason for his success. When he left the firm that employed him as a draughtsman and started out for himself, with not a thing coming in for him to do, don’t you remember that even then everybody had the impression, somehow, that he was a genius and going to do wonders when the chance came? How do you suppose that got to be the general impression except through Amelia’s touting it about? And then, when he did put up a few little houses, don’t you remember hearing it said that they represented the first real Architecture with a capital ‘A’ ever seen in the whole city? Now, almost nobody really knows anything about architecture, though we all talk about it as glibly as if we did, and pretty soon — don’t you remember? — we were all raving over those little houses of Roderick B
rooks Battle’s. What do you suppose made us rave? We must have been wrong, because Amelia says now that Battle thinks those first houses of his were ‘rather bad’ — he’s ‘grown so tremendously in his art.’ Well, since they were bad, what except Amelia made us think then that they were superb? And look at what’s happened to Battle these last few years. In spite of Amelia’s boring us to death about him, isn’t it true that there’s somehow a wide impression that he’s a great man? Of course there is!”
“And yet,” Mrs. Dodge interposed, “he’s not done anything that proves it. Battle’s a good architect, certainly, but there are others as good, and he’s not a bit better as an architect than Mr. Cromwell is as a lawyer or than my husband is as a consulting engineer.”
“Not a bit,” Mrs. Cromwell echoed, carrying on the thought she had been following. “But Mr. Dodge and Mr. Cromwell haven’t had anybody to go about, day after day for years, proclaiming them and building up a legend about them. Nobody has any idea that they’re great men, poor things! Don’t you see where that puts you and me, Lydia?”
“No, I don’t.”
“My dear!” Mrs. Cromwell exclaimed. “Why, even Battle himself didn’t know that he was a great man until he married Amelia and she believed he was — and told him he was — and started her long career of going about making everybody else sort of believe it, too.”
“I think it’s simply her own form of egoism,” said the emphatic Mrs. Dodge. “She’d have done exactly the same whoever she married.”
“Precisely! It’s Amelia’s way of being in love — she’s a born idolizer. But you didn’t answer me when I asked you where that puts us.”
“You and me?” Mrs. Dodge inquired, frowning.
“Don’t you see, if she’d married my husband, for instance, instead of Battle, everybody’d be having the impression by this time that Mr. Cromwell is a great man? He’d have felt that way himself, too, and I’m afraid it would give him a great deal of pleasure. Haven’t we failed as wives when we see what Amelia’s done for her husband?”
“What an idea!” The two ladies had been walking slowly as they talked; — now they came to a halt at their parting place before Mrs. Cromwell’s house, which was an important, even imposing, structure of the type called Georgian, and in handsome conventional solidity not unlike the lady who lived in it. Across the broad street was a newer house, one just finished, a pinkish stucco interpretation of Mediterranean gaiety, and so fresh of colour that it seemed rather a showpiece, not yet actually inhabited though glamoured with brocaded curtains and transplanted arbor vitæ into the theatrical semblance of a dwelling in use. Mrs. Dodge glanced across at it with an expression of disfavour. “I call the whole thing perfectly disgusting!” she said.
II. A LADY ACROSS THE STREET
MRS. CROMWELL ALSO looked at the new house; then she shook her head. “It’s painful, rather,” she said, and evidently referred to something more than the house itself.
“Outright disgusting!” her friend insisted. “I suppose he’s there as much as ever?”
“Oh, yes. Rather more.”
“Well, I’ll say one thing,” Mrs. Dodge declared; “Amelia Battle won’t get any sympathy from me!”
“Sympathy? My dear, you don’t suppose she dreams she needs sympathy! Doesn’t she show the rest of us every day how she pities us because we’re not married to Roderick Brooks Battle?”
“Yes, and that’s what makes me so furious. But she will need sympathy,” Mrs. Dodge persisted, with a dark glance at the new house across the street. “She will when she knows about that!”
“But maybe she’ll never know.”
“What!” Mrs. Dodge laughed scornfully. “My dear, when a woman builds a man into a god he’s going to assume the privileges of a god.”
“And behave like the devil?”
“Just that,” Mrs. Dodge returned, grimly. “Especially when his idolater has burnt up her youth on his altar and her friends begin to notice she’s getting a skimpy look. What chance has a skimpy-looking slave against a glittering widow rich enough to build a new house every time she wants to have tête-à-têtes with a godlike architect?”
“But she’s only built one,” Mrs. Cromwell cried, protesting.
“So far!” her pessimistic companion said; then laughed at her own extravagance, and became serious again. “I think Amelia ought to know.”
“Oh, no!”
“Yes, she ought,” Mrs. Dodge insisted. “In the first place, she ought to be saved from making herself so horribly ridiculous. Of course, she’s always been ridiculous; but the way she raves about him when he’s raving about another woman — why, it’s too ridiculous! In the second place, if she knew something about the Mrs. Sylvester affair now it might help her to bear a terrific jolt later.”
“What terrific jolt, Lydia?”
“If he leaves her,” Mrs. Dodge said, gravely. “If Mrs. Sylvester decides to make him a permanent fixture. Men do these things nowadays, you know.”
“Yes, I know they do.” Mrs. Cromwell looked as serious as her friend did, though her seriousness was more sympathetically a troubled one than Mrs. Dodge’s. “Poor Amelia! To wear her youth out making a man into such a brilliant figure that a woman of the Sylvester type might consider him worth while taking away from her—”
“Look!” Mrs. Dodge interrupted in a thrilled voice.
A balustraded stone terrace crossed the façade of the new house, and two people emerged from a green door and appeared upon the terrace. One was a man whose youthful figure made a pleasing accompaniment to a fine and scholarly head; — he produced, moreover, an impression of success and distinction obvious to the first glance of a stranger, though what was most of all obvious about him at the present moment was his devoted, even tender, attention to the woman at his side. She was a tall and graceful laughing creature, so sparklingly pretty as to approach the contours and colours of a Beauty. Her rippling hair glimmered with a Venetian ruddiness, and the blue of her twinkling eyes was so vivid that a little flash of it shot clear across the street and was perceptible to the two observant women as brightest azure.
Upon her lovely head she had a little sable hat, and, over a dress of which only a bit of gray silk could be glimpsed at throat and ankle, she wore a sable coat of the kind and dimensions staggering to moderate millionaires She had the happy and triumphant look of a woman confident through experience that no slightest wish of hers would ever be denied by anybody, herself distinctly included; and, all in all, she was dazzling, spoiled, charming, and fearless.
Certainly she had no fear of the two observant women, neither of their opinion nor of what she might give them cause to tell; — that sparkle of azure she sent across the intervening street was so carelessly amused it was derisive, like the half nod to them with which she accompanied it. She and her companion walked closely together, absorbed in what they were saying, her hand upon his arm; and, when they came to the terrace steps, where a closed foreign car waited, with a handsome young chauffeur at the wheel and a twin of him at attention beside the door, she did a thing that Mrs. Dodge and Mrs. Cromwell took to be final and decisive.
Her companion had evidently offered some light pleasantry or witticism at which she took humorous offense, for she removed her white-gloved hand from his arm and struck him several times playfully upon the shoulder — but with the last blow allowed her hand to remain where it was; and, although she might have implied that it was to aid her movement into the car, the white fingers could still be seen remaining upon the shoulder of the man’s brown overcoat as he, moving instantly after her, took his seat beside her in the gray velvet interior. Thus, what appeared to be a playful gesture protracted itself into a caress, and a caress of no great novelty to the participants.
At least, it was so interpreted across the street, where Mrs. Dodge gave utterance to a sound vocal but incoherent, and Mrs. Cromwell said “Oh, my!” in a husky whisper. The French car glided by them, passing them as they openly stared at it, o
r indeed glared at it, and a moment later it was far down the street, leaving them to turn their glares upon each other.
“That settles it,” Mrs. Dodge gasped. “It ought to have been a gondola.”
“A gondola?”
“A Doge’s wife carrying on with a fool poet or something; — she always has that air to me. What a comedy!”
Mrs. Cromwell shook her head; her expression was of grief and shock. “It’s tragedy, Lydia.”
“Just as you choose to look at it. The practical point of view is that it’s going to happen to Amelia, and pretty soon, too! Some day before long that man’s going to walk in and tell her she’s got to step aside and let him marry somebody else. Doesn’t what we just saw prove it? That woman did it deliberately in our faces, and she knows we’re friends of his wife’s. She deliberately showed us she didn’t care what we saw. And as for him—”
“He didn’t see us, I think,” Mrs. Cromwell murmured.
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 361
