Collected Works of Booth Tarkington

by Booth Tarkington

  “Mrs. Cromwell and Miss Cornelia had an engagement they couldn’t break. They said for me to say they’re sorry they couldn’t be here when you came,” a maid told her. “Mrs. Cromwell said tell you she’s giving a dinner for you and Miss Cornelia this evening. It’s set for early because they’re going to theatricals and dancing somewheres else afterward, so she thought p’raps you better begin dressing soon as your trunk gets here. They’ll have to dress in a hurry, theirselves, so you may not see ’em till dinner.”

  But Elsie did not have to wait that long. Half an hour later, when she had begun to dress, Cornelia rushed in, all fur and cold rosy cheeks. She embraced the visitor impetuously. “D’you mind bein’ hugged by a bear?” she asked. “I couldn’t wait even to take off my coat, because I remembered what an awf’ly nice little thing you were! Do you know we haven’t seen each other for nine years?” She stepped back with her hands upon Elsie’s shoulders. “I’ve got to fly and dress,” she said. “My but you’re lovely!”

  With that, she turned and scurried out of the room, leaving behind her a mingled faint scent of fur and violets, and the impression upon Elsie that this cousin of hers was the prettiest girl she had ever seen.

  Cornelia’s good looks terrified her the more. Probably there were other girls as pretty as that among Cornelia’s friends, the people she was to meet to-night. And Cornelia’s rush into the room, her flashing greeting, so impulsive, and her quick flight away were all flavoured with that dashingness with which Elsie felt she could never compete. “My, but you’re lovely!” was sweet of Cornelia, Elsie thought. But girls usually said things like that to their girl visitors — especially when the visitors had just arrived. Besides, anybody could see that Cornelia was as kind as she was pretty.

  “My, but you’re lovely!” was pleasant to hear, even from an impulsive cousin, yet it was of no great help to Elsie. She went on with her dressing, looking unhappily into the glass and thinking of what irony there had been in her father’s persistence. “To make me have a ‘good time’!” she thought. “As if I wouldn’t have had one at home, if I could! But of course he didn’t know that.”

  She was so afraid of what was before her, and so certain she was foredoomed, that during this troubled hour she learned the meaning of an old phrase describing fear; for she was indeed “sick with apprehension.” She took some spirits of ammonia in a glass of water as a remedy for that sickness. “Oh, Papa!” she moaned. “What have you done to me?”

  The maid who had brought her to her room reappeared with a bouquet of rosebuds and lilies of the valley, to be worn. “It’s from one of the gentlemen that’s coming to dinner, Miss Cornelia said. He sent two. Pr’aps I could pin it on for you.”

  Elsie let her render this service, and when it was done the woman smiled admiringly. “It certainly becomes you,” she said. “I might say it looks like you.”

  Elsie regarded her with a stare so wide and blank that the maid thought her probably haughty. “Excuse me, ma’am. Could I be of any more assistance?”

  “No, thank you,” Elsie said, still staring, and turned again to the mirror as the flatterer left the room.

  The bouquet was beautiful, and, before the evening was over, the unknown gentleman who had sent it would be of a mind that the joke was on him, Elsie thought. The misplaced blarney of an Irishwoman had amazed but not cheered her; and the clock on the mantel-shelf warned her that the time was ten minutes before seven. She took some more ammonia.

  The next moment into the room came her aunt, large, decorously glittering, fundamentally important. She was also warm-hearted, and she took her niece in her arms and kissed her as if she wanted to kiss her. Then she did as Cornelia had done — held her at arm’s length and looked at her. “You dear child!” she said. “I’ve wanted so long to get hold of you. A man never knows how to bring up a girl; she has to do it all herself. You’ve done it excellently, I can see, Elsie. You have lovely taste; that’s just the dress I’d have picked out for you myself. And to think I haven’t seen you since your dear mother left us! Cornelia hasn’t seen you for much longer than that — you and she haven’t had a glimpse of each other since you were ten or eleven years old.”

  “Yes,” Elsie said. “I saw her a little while ago.” She gulped feebly, and by a great effort kept her voice steady. “Aunt Mildred, how proud of her you must be! I want to tell you something: I think Cornelia is the very prettiest girl I’ve ever seen in my whole life.”

  Mrs. Cromwell took her hands from her niece’s shoulders, and, smiling, stepped backward a pace and shook her head. “No,” she said. “Cornelia’s very pretty, but she isn’t that pretty.”

  “I think she is.”

  “No.” Mrs. Cromwell laughed; then became serious. She swept a look over her niece from head to foot — the accurately estimating scrutiny of an intelligent and experienced woman who is careful to be an honest mother. “Of course Cornelia isn’t in your class,” she said, quietly.

  Then she turned to the door. “Come down to the drawing-room a minute or so before seven,” she said, and was gone.

  Elsie stood, cataleptic.

  The words seemed to linger upon the stirred air of the spacious room. “Of course Cornelia isn’t in your class.” Cornelia’s mother had not intended to be satirical; she had been perfectly serious and direct, and she had really meant that Cornelia, not Elsie, was of the lower class of prettiness. Here were three dumfounding things in a row: “My, but you’re lovely!”

  “It certainly becomes you — I might say it looks like you.”

  “Of course Cornelia isn’t in your class.” The third was the astounding climax that now made the first two almost — almost convincing!

  Elsie rushed to the long mirror and in a turmoil of bewilderment gazed and gazed at what she saw there. And as she looked, there slowly came a little light that grew to be a sparkling in those startled eyes of hers; her lips parted; breathlessly she smiled a little; — then, all in a flash, radiantly. For what she saw in the mirror was charming. No fear of hers, no long experience of neglect, could deny it; and at last she was sure that whatever the wrong thing about her was, it could be nothing she would ever see in a mirror. She was actually what at home she had sometimes suspected and then believed impossible.

  She was beautiful — and knew it!

  Marvelling, trembling with timid and formless premonitions of rapture, she stood aglow in the revelation. She leaned closer to the mirror and spoke to it in a low voice, almost brokenly: “My, but you’re lovely — I might say it looks like you — of course she isn’t in your class!”

  Then, with new and strange stars in her eyes, this sudden Cinderella went out of her room and down the wide stairway, dazed but not afraid. The miracle had already touched her.

  Her uncle met her at the doorway of the drawingroom. “This is not little Elsie!” he said. “Why, good heavens, your father didn’t write us his Elsie had grown up into anything like you!”

  Immediately he took her upon his arm and turned to cross the room with her, going toward the dozen young people clustered about Cornelia.

  But Cornelia came running to her cousin. “You’re dazzling!” she whispered, and it was obvious that Cornelia’s friends had the same impression. They stopped talking abruptly as Elsie entered the room, and they remained in an eloquent state of silence until Cornelia began to make their names known to the visitor. Even after that, they talked in lowered voices until they went out to the diningroom.

  XXIV. TRANSFIGURATION

  THEY WERE LIVELIER at the table, but not nearly so noisy as Mamie Ford and Paul Reamer and their intimates would have been at a dinner party at home, Elsie thought; though this was but a hasty and vague comparison flitting through her mind. She was not able to think definitely about anything for a time: she was too dazzled by being dazzling. Her clearest thought was an inquiry: Was this she, herself, and, if she was indeed Elsie Hemingway, were these queer, kind, new people now about her quite sane?

  The tall you
ng man with the long face who sat at her left talked to her as much as he could, being hampered by the circumstance that the fair-haired short young man on her right did his best to talk to her all the time, except when she spoke. Then both of them listened with deference; and so did a third young man directly across the table from her. More than that, she could not look about her without encountering the withdrawing glances of other guests of both sexes, though some of these glances, not from feminine orbs, were in no polite flurry to withdraw, but remained thoughtfully upon her as long as she looked their way. Could it be Elsie Hemingway upon whom fond eyes of youth thus so sweetly lingered?

  Too centred upon the strange experience to think much about these amazing people except as adjuncts to her transfiguration, she nevertheless decided that she liked best the tall gentleman at her left. He was not so young as the others, appearing to be as far advanced toward middle-age as twenty-seven — or possibly even twenty-nine — and she decided that his long, irregular face was “interesting.” She asked him to “straighten out the names” of the others for her, hoping that he would straighten out his own before he finished.

  He began with Lily Dodge. “Our prettiest girl,” he explained, honestly unconscious of what his emphasis implied. “That is, she’s been generally considered so since your cousin Anne was married. The young man on Miss Dodge’s right and in such a plain state of devotion is named Henry Burnett just now.”

  “Just now? Does his name change from time to time?”

  “Poor Henry’s doesn’t, no; nor the condition in which Miss Dodge keeps him — probably because she likes to win golf tournament cups with him. I mean, the next time you see her at a dinner the man beside her in that state may have another name. She changes ’em.”

  “I see,” Elsie said. She looked absently at Miss Dodge, not aware that there could be anything in common between them, much less that in a manner they had shared a day of agony, no great while past. “She seems very lovely.”

  “In her own way, yes,” her neighbour returned without enthusiasm. “The man on her left—”

  Elsie laughed and interrupted. “What I meant to get at — if you don’t mind — was the name of the man on my left!”

  “Of course you wouldn’t have caught it,” he said. “You naturally wouldn’t remember, hearing it spoken with the others.”

  “No,” she said. “Yet I think I do remember that Cornelia spoke it a little more impressively than she did any of theirs.”

  “That’s only because I’m in her father’s firm.

  The most junior member, of course. They use me as a waste-basket.”

  “As what?”

  “A waste-basket. When Mr. Cromwell and the really important partners discover some bits of worthless business cluttering up the office they fill me up with it. Every good office has a young wastebasket, Miss Hemingway.”

  “But you haven’t yet told me this one’s name.”

  “Harley.”

  He laughed ruefully, and she asked why. “Harley doesn’t seem a funny name to me,” she said. “I don’t understand your laughing.”

  “It’s to keep from crying,” he explained. “My father was dead before I was born and my mother died just after. I was taken over by my grandfather, and he named me for three of Napoleon’s marshals — Berthier Ney Junot Harley. It takes a grandfather to do things like that to you!”

  “But Junot wasn’t a marshal,” Elsie said. “He hoped to be, but the Emperor never made him one; Junot was too flighty.”

  Mr. Harley stared. “I remember that’s true; — I spoke of three marshals hastily. I should have said two and a general. My grandfather brought me up on ’em, and I still collect First Empire books. But imagine your knowing!”

  “You mean you think I don’t look—”

  He interrupted earnestly. “I’m afraid it’s too soon for you to let me tell you how I think you look. But you do laugh at my names, don’t you?”

  “No; they don’t seem funny to me.”

  “Don’t you ever laugh except when things are funny?” he asked.

  “Yes, I do,” she said. “I’ve laughed thousands of times when everything was horribly unfunny.”

  “Then why did you laugh?”

  For an instant she looked at him gravely. “To try to be ‘popular,’” she said.

  Plainly he thought this funny enough for laughter. “That is a joke!” he said. “But if laughing makes you any more ‘popular’ than you would be without it, I hope for this one evening at least you’ll be as solemn as an obelisk.”

  Of course Elsie said, “Why?”

  “Because if you laugh I won’t get to see anything of you at all. I’m afraid I won’t anyhow.”

  He spoke with gravity, meaning what he said; and the event proved his fear justified. He got halfway round the country-club ballroom with her, after the theatricals, a surprising number of times, but seldom much farther. However, he conclusively proved his possession of that admirable quality, dogged persistence, and so did the other young gentlemen of the dinner party. So did more than these, including probably a majority of the men and youths, married or single, present that evening at the Blue Hills Club.

  Elsie wondered when the spell would break. It seemed impossible that she wouldn’t be found out presently as a masquerader and dropped into her old homelike invisibility. But whether the break came or not, she knew she would never again be so miserable as she had been, because she was every moment more and more confidently daring to know that she was beautiful. She laughed at a great many things that weren’t funny during this gracious evening; for laughter may spring as freely from excited happiness as from humour; but she made no effort to be noisy — noisiness appeared to be not a necessity at all, but superfluous. And what pleased her most, the girls were “nice” to her, too, as she defined their behaviour; — they formed part of the clusters about her when the music was silent, and they eagerly competed to arrange future entertainment for her. Elsie loved them all, these strange, adorable people who had not seen the wrong thing about her.

  The old walls built round her by her own town, enclosing her with such seeming massive permanence and so tightly, now at a stroke proved to be illusion; she was discovering that they were but apparitions all unreal, and that this world is mysterious and can be happily so. Something of its humorous mysteries in dealing with young hearts another person, near her, also learned that night; for Cornelia Cromwell, by coincidence, had a queer experience of her own.

  Beyond the outer fringe of dancers she saw her mother standing among a group of the older people; — one of these was Miss Bailey, the principal of the suburban school in which Cornelia had once been a pupil. Cornelia had not seen her for several years and went conscientiously to greet her. Principal and former pupil made the appropriate exchanges; but Cornelia was rather vague with the grayish gentleman who had Miss Bailey upon his arm.

  Mrs. Cromwell said something as in correction of an error; but it was too late, and the couple had moved away before Cornelia understood.

  “You called her Miss Bailey,” Mrs. Cromwell explained. “She’s been married to Professor Bromley for two years.”

  “What! Was that funny little old—” Cornelia checked herself; but the tactful mother had already turned away to speak to someone else. The daughter stood and gazed at the stiff little old-fashioned gentleman standing punctiliously arm-in-arm with his wife. “Oh, dear me!” Cornelia whispered.

  Then she ran back, wide-eyed, to rejoin an anxious lad who had arrived late. “Look here,” he said. “You’ve missed another chance to let me meet your cousin. What did you run away like that for?”

  “To learn something important,” Cornelia told him. “Come on; — I’ll get you through to Elsie somehow.”

  For the unmasking of Elsie, that dreaded break in the spell, still postponed itself as the evening wore on. Her miraculous night continued to be a miracle to the end, and she was a girl grateful for wonders when she talked them over with her cousin in th
e big bedroom, after two o’clock in the morning.

  “I never met such darling people in the whole world!” she declared. “I never knew—”

  “What nonsense!” Cornelia laughed. “You must be perfectly used to being a sensation wherever you go, Elsie.”

  “A ‘sensation’?” Elsie cried. “I?”

  “Don’t tell me you don’t know it!”

  “Cornelia, you don’t understand. Nobody was ever really nice to me at a party before to-night in my whole life.”

  At that her cousin beamed upon her. “I believe that’s what I like best of all about you, Elsie.”

  “You mean nobody ever being nice to me before?”

  “No,” Cornelia laughed. “I mean your not admitting that you know it. Of course you do know, because it’s impossible for a girl like you not to realize the effect you have on people; but I love you for pretending you don’t see it.”

  “But it’s true,” Elsie insisted. “Until to-night nobody ever — —”

  “Yes, yes! Go on! It’s very becoming, and it’s what placates the other girls so that you get both sexes in your train, you clever thing!”

  “I’m not clever, though,” the visitor protested. “I’m no good at all at pretending things. I’m not —— —”

  “Aren’t you?” Cornelia laughed. “Well, it’s nice of you to try to be modest, then. Your thinking you ought to be is one of your charms. It isn’t the biggest one, though. Everybody saw that one the instant you came downstairs to-night and stood in the drawing-room doorway, just before Father went to bring you in. It was very striking, Elsie.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “That’s right; you oughtn’t to know,” Cornelia said, seriously. “It has to be spontaneous, I suppose, and it probably can’t be imitated or done deliberately.”

  “But I didn’t do anything!” Elsie cried.

  “I know you didn’t; that’s just what I’m pointing out. Maybe it was something they call ‘magnetism’; but anyhow it was more than just being a beauty.