“Yes,” he said, “it would be the kindest thing you can do for me. Shall I tell you why? It’s because I’m hopelessly near-sighted. I wear glasses when I’m alone in my study, where nobody can see me.”
“What in the world has that to do with my leaving you?” she asked, colouring up.
“Suffragettes would never marry a near-sighted man, would they?”
“They ought not to.”
“You wouldn’t, would you?”
“Why do you ask — such a thing?”
“I want to know.”
“But how does your myopia concern me?” she said faintly.
“Couldn’t it — ever?” he asked, reddening.
“No,” she said, turning pale.
“Then we’d better not stay here; and I’m going to be as generous as you are,” he said, advancing toward her. “I’m going to let you go home.”
She backed away, thrusting the papers behind her; his arm slipped around her, after them, strove to grasp them, to hold and restrain her, but there was a strength in her tall, firm young body which matched his own; she resisted, turned, twisted, confronted him with high colour, and lips compressed, and they came to a deadlock, breathing fast and irregularly.
Again, coolly, dexterously, he pitted his adroitness, then his sheer strength against hers; and it came again to a deadlock.
Suddenly she crook’d one smooth knee inside of his; her arms slid around him like lightning; he felt himself rising into the air, descending — there came a crash, a magnificent display of ocular fireworks, and nothing further concerned him until he discovered himself lying flat on the floor and heard somebody sobbing incoherencies beside him.
He was mean enough to keep his eyes shut while she, on her knees beside him, slopped water on his forehead and begged him to speak to her, and told him her heart was broken and she desired to die and repose in mortuary simplicity beside him forever.
Certain terms she employed in addressing what she feared were only his mortal remains caused him to prick up his ears. He certainly was one of the meanest of men.
“Dear,” she sobbed, “I — I have l-loved you ever since your lithographs were displayed during the election! Only speak to me! Only open those beloved eyes! I don’t care whether they are near-sighted! Oh, please, please wake up!” she cried brokenly. “I’ll give you back your papers. What do I care about that old bill? I’m p-perfectly willing to do all those things! Oh, oh, oh! How conscience does make Haus-fraus of us all!”
His meanness now became contemptible; he felt her trembling hands on his brow; the fragrant, tearful face nearer, nearer, until her hot, flushed cheeks and quivering lips touched his. And yet, incredible as it seems, and to the everlasting shame of all his sex, he kept eyes and mouth shut until a lively knocking on the door brought him bolt upright.
She uttered a little cry and shrank away from him on her knees, the tears glimmering in her startled and wide open eyes.
“Good heavens, darling!” he said seriously; “how on earth are we going to explain this?”
They scrambled hastily to their feet and gazed at each other while kicks and blows began to rain on the door.
“I believe it’s Dill,” he whispered; “and I seem to hear the Mayor’s voice, too.”
“Help! Help! For heaven’s sake!” screamed the Mayor, “let us in, George! There’s a mob of suffragettes coming up the stairs!”
The Governor unlocked the door and jerked it open, just as several unusually beautiful girls seized Mr. Dill and the Military Secretary.
The Mayor, however, rushed blindly into the room, his turban-swirl was over one eye, his skirt was missing, his apron hung by one pin.
He ran headlong for a sofa and tried to scramble under it, but lovely and vigorous arms seized his shins and drew him triumphantly forth.
“Hurrah!” they cried delightedly, “we have carried the entire ticket!”
“Hurrah!” echoed a sweet but tremulous voice, and a firm young arm was slipped through the Governor’s.
He turned to meet her beautiful, level gaze.
“Check!” she said.
“Make it check-mate,” he said steadily.
“Mate you?”
“Will you?”
She bent her superb head a moment, then lifted her splendid eyes to his.
“Of course I will,” she said, as steadily as her quickening heart permitted. “Why do you suppose I ran after you?”
“Why?” whispered that infatuated man.
“Because,” she said, naïvely, “I was afraid some other girl would get you. . . . A girl never can be sure what another girl might do to a man. . . . And I wanted you for myself.”
“Thank God,” he said, “that six-foot Professor Challis will never get me, anyway.”
She bent her adorable face close to his.
“Your excellency,” she murmured, “I am Professor Challis!”
At that instant a pretty and excited suffragette dashed up the stairs and saluted.
“Professor,” she cried, “all over the city desirable young men are being pursued and married by the thousands! We have swept the State, with Brooklyn and West Point yet to hear from!” Her glance fell upon the Governor; she laughed glee-fully.
“Shall I call a taxi, Professor?” she asked.
An exquisite and modest pride transformed the features of Professor Betty Challis to a beauty almost celestial.
“Let George do it,” she said tenderly.
XVII
A few minutes later, amid a hideous scene of riot, where young men were fleeing distractedly in every direction, where excited young girls were dragging them, struggling and screaming, into cabs, where even the police were rushing hither and thither in desperate search for a place to hide in, the Governor of New York and Professor Elizabeth Challis might have been seen whirling downtown in a taxicab toward the marriage license bureau.
Her golden head lay close to his; his moustache rested against her delicately flushed cheek. A moment later she sat up straight in dire consternation.
“Oh, those papers! The draft of the bill!” she exclaimed. “Where is it?”
“Did you want it, Betty?” he asked, surprised.
“Why — why, no. Didn’t you want it, George?”
“I? Not at all.”
“Then why on earth did you keep me imprisoned in that room so long if you didn’t want those papers?”
He said slowly: “Why didn’t you give them up to me if you didn’t really want them, Betty?”
She shook her pretty head. “I don’t know. . . . But I’m afraid it was only partly obstinacy.”
“It was only partly that with me,” he said.
They smiled.
“I just wanted to detain you, I suppose,” he admitted.
“George, you wouldn’t expect me to match that horrid confession — would you?”
“No, I wouldn’t ask it of you.”
He laid his cheek against hers and whispered: “Darling, do you think our great love justifies our concealing my myopia?”
“George,” she murmured, “I think it does. . . . Besides, I’m dreadfully near-sighted myself.”
“You!”
“Dear, every one of us has got something the matter with her. Miss Vining, who caught the Mayor, wears a rat herself. . . . Do you mean to say that men believe there ever was a perfect woman?”
He kissed her slowly. “I believe it,” he said.
XVIII
As the extremes of fashionable feminine costume appear first on Fifth Avenue in late November, and in early December are imitated in Harlem, and finally in January pervade the metropolitan purlieus, so all the great cities of the Union, writhing in the throes of a fashionable suffragette revolution, presently inoculated the towns; and the towns infected the villages, and the villages the hamlets, and the hamlets passed the contagion along into the open country, where isolated farms and dicky-birds alone remained uninfected and receptive.
It was even assert
ed by enthusiastic suffragettes that flocks of feminine dicky-birds had begun to assault masculine birds of the same variety; and that the American landscape was full of agitated male birds, lacking rear plumage, flying distractedly in every direction or squatting disconsolately in lonely trees, counting their tail feathers.
Mr. Borroughs and our late great President were excitedly inclined to believe it, but the most famous and calm of explorers, who had recently returned from exile to his camp on top of Mt. McKinley, warned the scientific world on a type-writer not to credit anything that anybody said until he had corroborated it in the magazines. And he left that week for another trip to the pole to find out what the attitude of the polecats might be concerning the matter in question.
Meanwhile the cities were full of trouble and forcibly selected bridegrooms. From 60,000 marriages recorded in New York City for the twelve months of the previous year, in the few months of the eugenic revolution the number of weddings had reached the enormous figures of 180,000, not including Flatbush.
Thousands and thousands of marriageable young men were hiding in their clubs or in the shrubbery of Central Park, waiting for a chance to make their escape to the country and remain incognito in hay lofts until the eugenic revolution had ended itself in a dazzling display of divorce.
Westchester, the Catskills, and even the country farther north were full of young business men and professional men fleeing headlong from their jobs in Wall Street, Broadway, and Fifth Avenue, and hiring out to farmers and boarding house keepers under assumed names. One could jump a young man out of almost any likely thicket north of the Bronx; they were as plentiful and as shy as deer in the Catskills; corn field, scrub, marsh, and almost any patch of woods in the State, if carefully beaten up, would have yielded at least one or two flocks of skulking young men.
Now, as there was no close season, and marriageable youths in New York City became scarcer, those militant suffragettes devoted to eugenic principles began to make excursions into the suburbs in search of bevies and singles — which had escaped the exciting days of the great Long Acre drive and the bachelors’ St. Bartholomew. And, as the April days turned into May days, and the May days into June days, parties of pretty, laughing, athletic girls penetrated farther and farther into the country, joyously rummaging the woods and routing out and scattering into flight the lurking denizens. For every den had its denizen, and Diana roamed the earth once more.
There was excellent sport to be had along the Hudson. Some young ladies went in automobiles; some in yachts; some by train, to points north, where the landscape looked more promising and wilder — but probably not as wild as the startled masculine countenances peering furtively from hillside thickets as some gay camping party of distractingly pretty girls appeared, carrying as excess baggage one clergywoman and a bundle of marriage licenses, with the bridegroom’s name represented only by a question mark.
It was on an unusually beautiful day in early June that two briar-mangled and weather-beaten young men, bearing every evidence of Wall Street and excessive fright, might have been seen sitting up like a brace of startled rabbits in a patch of ferns which grew along the edges of a brook at the foot of a charmingly wooded slope among the Westchester hills. In every direction stretched hills, woods, and Italians. The calm remote sky was blue and unvexed by anything except factory smoke; not a sound was visible, not a noise was to be seen.
Bacon was frying unctuously in a pan on the coals beside them; their suit-cases lay near. They sat up in the fern patch, coffee cups suspended, eyes wild, listening intently.
“Brown,” whispered Vance, “did you hear anything except the hum of automobiles?”
“I sure did,” nodded Brown, craning his neck like a turkey in a briar-patch and glaring around.
“If — if they’ve got dogs,” said Vance, “they’ll flush us before — hark! Great guns! Look at that bench show!”
Brown’s hair rose on end. “They have got dogs,” he whispered, “a toy bull, a Mexican, a Chow, two Pomms — and, by Jupiter! they’ve got a marmoset! Look at ‘em! Hark! You can hear those unnatural girls laughing! Me for a quick getaway. Come on!”
“They — they may come from some college,” faltered Vance; “they may run us down. Shall we trust to our protective colouring and squat close?”
“Do you want to stay here until that miserable Chow comes poking his orange-coloured head into the ferns and laughs at us with his blue tongue?”
Vance wrung his hands, hurling coffee all over Brown in his agonised indecision.
“Good heavens!” he moaned. “I don’t want to be married! I can’t afford it! Do you think those girls can outrun us?”
“If they can,” said Brown, “they’ll want me more than I want my liberty. Look out! There’s their bat-eared bull! See him sniff! The wretched mutt has winded the bacon! We’ve got to make a break for it now! Come on! Beat it, son!”
Up out of the covert crashed the two young fellows, and went prancing away through the woods, suit-cases in hand. A chorus of excited yelps and barks greeted the racket they made in their flight; a shrill whistle rang out, then a pretty and excited voice:
“Mark! Quick, Gladys! There are two of them! Mark left!”
“Are they any good?” cried Gladys. “Oh, where are they, dear?”
“I only caught a glimpse of them. They looked like fine ones, in splendid condition. Millicent! Quick, where are you?”
“Here!” came a third voice. “Oh, Constance! one is too perfectly splendid for anything! Chow-Chow is at his heels! Look out! Mark right!”
“Run!” panted Constance, leaping a fallen log.
The lovely June woodland was now echoing with the happy cries of the chase, the ki-yi of excited lap-dogs, the breathless voices of the young girls, the heavy crashing racket of stampeding young men rushing headlong through bramble and thicket with a noise like a hurricane amid dead leaves.
Vance’s legs, terror weakened, wobbled as he fled; and after ten minutes he took to a tree with a despairing scream.
Brown, looking back from the edge of a mountain pasture, saw the dogs leaping frantically at his friend’s legs as he shinned rapidly up the trunk, and disappeared into the clustering foliage; saw three flushed young girls come running up with cries of innocent delight; saw one of them release a slender, black, furry, spidery thing which immediately ran up the tree; heard distracted yells from Vance:
“For heaven’s sake, take away that marmoset! I can’t bear ’em — I hate ‘em, ladies! Ouch! He’s all over me! He’s trying to get into my pocket! Take him away, for the love of Mike, and I’ll come down!”
But Brown waited to hear no more. Horror now lent him her infernal wings; he fairly fluttered across the mountain side, sailed down the farther slope, and into a lonely country road. Along this he cantered, observed only by surprised cattle, until, exhausted, he slackened his pace to a walk.
Rickety fences and the remains of old stone walls flanked him on either hand; the clearings were few, the cultivated patches fewer. He encountered no houses. On a distant hillside stood a weather-beaten barn, the sky shining blue through its roof rafters.
Beyond this the road forked; one branch narrowed to a grassy cattle path and presently ended at a pair of bars. Inside the bars was a stone barn; beside the barn a house of the century before last — a low, square stone house, half stripped of its ancient stucco skin, a high-roofed one-story affair, with sagging dormers peering from the slates and little oblong loop-holes under the eaves, from which the straw of birds’ nests fluttered in the breeze.
Surely this ancient place, even if inhabited — as he saw it was — must be sufficiently remote from the outer world to insure his safety. For here the mountain road ended at the barn-yard bars; here the low wooded hills walled in this little world of house, barn, and orchard, making a silent, sunny place under the blue sky, sweet with late lilac bloom and the hum of bees. No factory smoke was visible, no Italians.
He looked at the aged house. A blac
k cat sat on the porch thoughtfully polishing her countenance with the back of one paw. Three diminutive parti-coloured kittens frisked and rolled and toddled around her; and occasionally she seized one and washed it energetically against the grain.
Brown looked at the door with its iron knocker, at the delicately spread fan-light over it, at the side-lights, at the half-pillars with their Ionic capitals, at the ancient clumps of lilacs flanking the stone step — great, heavy-stemmed and gnarled old bushes now all hung with perfumed clusters of palest lavender bloom.
Leaning there on the picket fence he inhaled their freshness, gazing up into the sunny foliage of the ancient trees, elms, maples, and one oak so aged and so magnificent that, awed, his eyes turned uneasily again toward the house to reassure himself that it was still inhabited.
Cat and kittens were comfortable evidence, also a hen or two loitering near, and the pleasant sound from a dozen bee-hives, and a wild rose in a china bowl, dimly visible on an inner window-sill.
There were two characters he might assume; he might go to the back door and request a job; he might bang on the front door with that iron knocker, shaped like a mermaid, and ask for country board.
Of one thing, somehow or other, he was convincing himself; this crumbling house and its occupants knew as much about the recent high-jinks in New York as did the man who built it in the days when loop-holes were an essential part of local architecture, and the painted Sagamore passed like a spectre through the flanking forests.
So Brown, carrying his suit-case, opened the gate, walked up the path, seized the knocker, and announced himself with resolution.
XIX
While he waited the cat looked up at him, curiously but pleasantly. “Hello, old lady,” he said; and she arched her back and rubbed lightly against his nigh leg while the kittens tumbled over his shoes and played frantically with the frayed bottoms of his trousers.
This preliminary welcome seemed to comfort him out of all proportion to its significance; he gazed complacently about at the trees and flowers, drew in deep breaths of the lilac’s fragrance, and waited, listening contentedly for the coming foot-fall.
Works of Robert W Chambers Page 628
