“And what did she—”
“She jumped right up and came and threw her arms around me,” said Mrs. Dodge in a strained voice. “I never had such an experience in my life!”
“But what did she say?”
“She said, ‘You poor thing!”’ Mrs. Dodge explained irascibly. “She didn’t ‘say’ it, either; she shouted it, and she kept on shouting it over and over. ‘You poor thing!’ And when she wasn’t saying that, she was saying she’d never dreamed Mr. Dodge was that sort of a man, and she made such a commotion I was afraid the neighbours would hear her!”
“But why didn’t you—”
“I did!” Mrs. Dodge returned passionately. “I told her a hundred times I didn’t mean Mr. Dodge; but she never gave me a chance to finish a word I began; she just kept taking on about what a terrible thing it must be for me, and how dreadful it was to think of Mr. Dodge misbehaving like that — I tell you I never in my life had such an experience!”
“But why didn’t you make her listen, at least long enough to—”
Mrs. Dodge’s look was that of a person badgered to desperation. “I couldn’t! Every time I opened my mouth she shouted louder than I did! She’d say, ‘You poor thing!’ again, or some more about Mr. Dodge, or she’d want to know if I didn’t need ammonia or camphor, or she’d offer to make beef tea for me! And every minute my husband was making an idiot of himself ringing the Battles’ telephone again. You don’t seem to understand what sort of an experience it was at all! I tell you when I finally had to leave the house she was standing on their front steps shouting after me that she’d never tell anybody a thing about Mr. Dodge unless I wanted her to!”
“It’s so queer!” Mrs. Cromwell said, bewildered more than ever. “If I’d been in your place I know I’d never have come away without making her understand I meant her husband, not mine!”
“‘Making her understand!’” Mrs. Dodge repeated, mocking her friend’s voice — so considerable was her bitterness. “You goose! You don’t suppose she didn’t understand that, do you?”
“You don’t think—”
“Absolutely! She had been expecting it to happen.”
“What to happen?”
“Somebody’s coming to warn her about Mrs. Sylvester. She did the whole thing deliberately. Absolutely! She understood I was talking about Battle as well as you do now. Of course,” said Mrs. Dodge, “of course she understood!”
Then both ladies seemed to ponder, and for a time uttered various sounds of marvelling; but suddenly Mrs. Cromwell, whose glance had wandered to the window, straightened herself to an attentive rigidity. Her guest’s glance followed hers, and instantly became fixed; but neither lady spoke, for a sharply outlined coincidence was before them, casting a spell upon them and holding them fascinated.
Across the street a French car entered the driveway of the stucco house, and a Venetian Beauty descended, wrapped in ermine too glorious for the time and occasion. Out of the green door of the house eagerly came upon the balustraded terrace a dark man, poetic and scholarly in appearance, dressed scrupulously and with a gardenia, like a bridegroom’s flower, in his coat. In his hand he held an architect’s blue print; but for him and for the azure-eyed lady in ermine this blue print seemed not more important, nor less, than that book in which the two lovers of Rimini read no more one day. They glanced but absently at the blue print; then the man let it dangle from his hand while he looked into the lady’s eyes and she into his; and they talked with ineffable gentleness together.
Here was an Italian episode most romantic in its elements: a Renaissance terrace for the trysting place of a Renaissance widow and a great man, two who met and made love under the spying eyes of female sbirri lurking in a window opposite; but it was Amelia Battle who made the romantic episode into a realistic coincidence. In a vehicle needful of cleansing and polish she appeared from down the long street, sitting in the attentive attitude necessary for the proper guidance of what bore her, and wearing (as Mrs. Cromwell hoarsely informed Mrs. Dodge) “her market clothes.” That she was returning from a market there could be no doubt; Amelia had herself this touch of the Renaissance, but a Renaissance late, northern, and robust. Both of the rear windows of her diligent vehicle framed still-life studies to lure the brush of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century lowland painters: the green tops of sheaved celery nodded there; fat turnips reposed in baskets; purple ragged plumes of beets pressed softly against the glass; jugs that suggested buttermilk and cider, perhaps both, snugly neighboured the hearty vegetables, and made plain to all that the good wife in the forward seat had a providing heart for her man and her household.
The ladies in the Georgian window were truly among those who cared to look. “Oh, my!” Mrs. Cromwell whispered.
Amelia stopped her market machine and jumped out in her market clothes at the foot of the driveway, where stood Mrs. Sylvester’s French car in the care of its two magnificent young men. There was an amiable briskness, cheerful and friendly, in the air with which Amelia trotted up the terrace steps and joined the romantic couple standing beside the balustrade. The three entered into converse.
Mrs. Cromwell and Mrs. Dodge became even more breathless; and then, with amazement, and perhaps a little natural disappointment, they saw that the conversation was not acrimonious — at least, not outwardly so. They marked that Amelia, smiling, took the lead in it, and that she at once set her hand upon her husband’s arm — and in a manner of ownership so masterful and complete that the proprietorship assumed by Mrs. Sylvester in the same gesture, the preceding day, seemed in comparison the temporary claim of a mere borrower. And Mrs. Cromwell marked also a kind of feebleness in the attitude of the Venetian Beauty: Mrs. Sylvester was smiling politely, but there was a disturbed petulance in her smile. Suddenly Mrs. Cromwell perceived that beside Amelia, for all Amelia’s skimpiness, Mrs. Sylvester looked ineffective. With that, glancing at the sturdy figure of Lydia Dodge, Mrs. Cromwell came to the conclusion that since Amelia had been too much for Lydia, Amelia would certainly be too much for Mrs. Sylvester.
“Look!” said Lydia.
Amelia and her husband were leaving the terrace together. Battle walked to the “sedan” with her and held the door open for her; she climbed to the driver’s seat and seemed to wait, with assurance, for him to do more than hold the door. And at this moment the seriousness of his expression was so emphasized that it was easily visible to the Georgian window, though only his profile was given to its view as he looked back, over his shoulder, at the glazing smile of the lady upon the terrace. He seemed to waver, hesitating; and then, somewhat bleakly, he climbed into the “sedan” beside his wife.
“Open it!” Mrs. Dodge was struggling with a catch of the Georgian window.
“What for?”
“She’s shouting again! I’ve got to hear her!” Mrs. Dodge panted; and the window yielded to her exertions.
Amelia’s attitude showed that she was encouraging her machine to begin operations, while at the same time she was calling parting words to Mrs. Sylvester. “Good-bye!” Amelia shouted. “Mr. Battle says he’s been so inspired by your sympathy in his work! Mr. Battle says that’s so necessary to an architect! Mr. Battle says no artist can ever even hope to do anything great without it! Mr. Battle says—”
But here, under the urging of her foot, the engine burst into a shattering uproar: ague seized the car with a bitter grip; convulsive impulses of the apparatus to leap at random were succeeded by more decorous ideas, and then the “sedan” moved mildly forward; the vegetables nodded affably in the windows, and the Battles were borne from sight.
“I see,” said Lydia Dodge, moving back to her chair. “I understand now.”
“You understand what?” her hostess inquired, brusquely, as she closed the Georgian window.
“I understand what I just saw. I can’t tell you exactly how or why, but it was plainly there — in Roderick Brooks Battle’s look in his slightest gesture. We were absolutely mistaken to think it possible. He�
�ll never ask Amelia to step aside: he’ll never leave her. And however much he philanders, she’ll never leave him, either. She’ll go straight on the way she’s always gone. He’s shown us that, and she’s shown us that.”
“Well, then,” Mrs. Cromwell inquired; “why is it? You say you understand.”
“It’s because he knows that between his Venetian romance and his press agent he’s got to take the press agent. He’s had sense enough to see he mightn’t be a great man at all without his press agent — and he’d rather keep on being a great man. And Amelia knows she’s getting too skimpy-looking to get a chance to make a great man out of anybody else; so she wouldn’t let me tell her about him, because she’s going to stick to him!”
At this Mrs. Cromwell made gestures of negation and horror, though in the back of her mind, at that moment, she was recalling her yesterday’s thought that Lydia’s sense of duty was really Lydia’s pique. “Lydia Dodge!” she cried, “I won’t listen to you! Don’t you know you’re taking the lowest, unchristianest, vilest possible view of human nature?”
Mrs. Dodge looked guilty, but she decided to offer a plea in excuse. “Well, I suppose that may be true,” she said. “But sometimes it does seem about the only way to understand people!”
V. ONE OF MRS. CROMWELL’S DAUGHTERS
IN THE SPACIOUS suburb’s most opulent quarter, where the houses stood in a great tract of shrubberies, gardens, and civilized old woodland groves, there were many happily marriageable girls; and one, in particular, was supremely equipped in this condition, for she had what the others described as “the best of everything.” In the first place, they said, Anne Cromwell had “looks”; in the second place, she had “money,” and in the third she had “family,” by which they meant the background prestiges of an important mother and several generations of progenitors affluently established upon this soil.
Sometimes they added a word or two about her manners, though a middle-aged listener might not have divined that the allusion was to manners.
“She manages wonderf’ly,” they said. Amiably reserved, and never an eager contestant in the agonizing little competitions that necessarily engage maidens of her age, she was not merely fair but generous to her rivals. “She can afford to be!” they cried, thus paying tribute. Her fairness prevailed, too, among her suitors: not one could say she favoured him more than another; but like a young princess, as politic as she was well bred and genuinely kind, she showed an impartial friendliness to everybody.
Even without her background she was the most noticeable young figure in the suburb, but never because she did anything to make herself conspicuous. At the Green Hills Country Club the eye of a stranger, watching the dancing on a summer night, would not immediately distinguish an individual from the mass. As the dancers went lightly interweaving over the floor of a roofless pavilion, where the foliage of great beech trees hung trembling above white balustrades and Venetian lamps, the spectator’s first glance from the adjoining veranda caught only the general aspect of carnival: the dancers were like a confusion of gaily coloured feathers blowing and whirlpooling across a dim tapestry. But presently, as he looked, rhythms and shifting designs would appear in the sparkling fluctuation; points of light would separate themselves, talcing individual contour, and the brightest would be a lovely girl’s head of “gold cooled in moonlight.”
Then it would be observed that toward this bright head darker ones darted and zigzagged through the crowd more frequently than toward any other, as the ardent youths plunged to “cut in”; and when the music stopped the lovely girl was not for an instant left to the single devotion of her partner. Other girls, as well as the young men, flocked about her, and wherever she moved there seemed to be something like a retinue. Thus the first question of the stranger, looking on, came to be expected as customary — almost inevitable, “Who is that?” The reply was as invariable, delivered with the amused condescension of a native receiving tribute to his climate or public monuments. “That’s what visitors always ask first. It’s Anne Cromwell.”
Mrs. Cromwell, sitting among contemporaries on the veranda that overlooked the dancing floor, had often heard both the question and the answer, and although she was one of those mothers known as “sensible,” she never heard either without a natural thrill of pride. But she was tactful enough to conceal her feeling from the mothers of other girls, and usually laughed deprecatingly, implying that she knew as well as any one how little such ephemeral things signified. Anne had her own deprecating laughter for tributes, and the most eager flatterer could not persuade her to the air of accepting them seriously; so that both mother and daughter, appearing to set no store by Anne’s triumphs, really made them all the more secure. It was a true instinct guiding them, the same that prevailed with Cæsar when thrice he refused the crown; for what hurts our little human hearts, when we watch a competitor’s triumph, is his pride and his pleasure in it. If he can persuade us that it brings him neither we will not grudge it to him, but may help him to greater.
Moreover, both Anne and her mother believed themselves to be entirely genuine in their deprecation of Anne’s preeminence, and, when they were alone together, talked tributes over with the same modest laughter they had for them in company. Yet Mrs. Cromwell never omitted to tell Anne of any stranger’s “Who is that?” nor of all the other pleasing things said to her, or in her hearing, of her daughter. And, on her own part, Anne laughed and told of the like things that had been said to her, or that she had overheard.
“Of course, it doesn’t mean anything,” she would add. “I just thought I’d tell you.”
For the truth was that Anne’s triumphs were the breath of life to both mother and daughter, and they were doomed to make the ancient discovery that our dearest treasures are those that are threatened.
The threat was perceived by Mrs. Cromwell upon one of those summer nights so exquisite that we call them “unreal,” because they belong to perished romance, and we have learned to imagine that what is real must be unlovely. Only the relics of a discredited sentimental epoch could go forth under the gold-pointed canopy of such a night, and sigh because the stars are ineffable. Mrs. Cromwell was such a relic, and, being in remote attendance upon her daughter at the country club, she had gone after dinner to walk alone upon the links in the starlight. In an old-fashioned mood, she naturally wanted to get away from the dance music of the open-air pavilion; but, when she returned, her shadow from the rising moon preceded her, and she decided that even the tomtoms and war horns of the young people’s favourite “orchestra” could never entirely ruin the moon. Then, instead of joining any of the groups upon the veranda, she went to an easy chair, aloof in a shadowy corner, where she could see the dancers and be alone to watch Anne.
She looked down a little wistfully. Only a year or so ago she had thus watched her oldest daughter, Mildred, now a matron, and in time she would probably see her youngest, the schoolgirl, Cornelia, dancing here. But Anne, though the mother strove not to know it, was her dearest, and the period of eligible maidenhood, like any other period, is not long. Mrs. Cromwell was wistful because she thought it would not be really long before Anne might sit here to watch the maiden dancing of a daughter of her own.
The pavilion was a little below the level of the veranda, and almost at once her eye found the dominant fair head it sought. Anne was talking as she danced, smiling serenely, a graceful young figure, shapely and tall, with a hint of the contented ampleness that would come later, as it had come to her mother. Mrs. Cromwell, seeing Anne’s smile, smiled too, in her seclusion, and with the same serenity; though an enemy might have said that these two smiles partook of the same complacency. However, at that moment Mrs. Cromwell could not have imagined the existence of an enemy: she had no conception that there could be in the world such a thing as an enemy to herself or to her daughter.
She was a little sorry that Anne wasn’t dancing with young Harrison Crisp. She liked to see Anne dancing with any “nice boy,” but best of all with yo
ung Crisp, and this was not only because the two were harmoniously matched as dancers, as well as in other ways, but because the mother had comprehended that this young man might prove to be her daughter’s preference for more than dancing. Mrs. Cromwell was not anxious to see Anne married; she wished her to prolong the pretty time of girlhood; but any mother must have been pleased to see so splendid a young man place himself at her daughter’s disposal. Mrs. Cromwell wondered where he was this evening, and she had just begun to look for him among the dancers when strangers intruded upon her retreat.
She heard unfamiliar voices behind her, and then small group of middle-aged people drew up wicker chairs to the veranda railing that overlooked the dancing-floor. Mrs. Cromwell gave them a side glance and perceived that they were visitors, “put up” at the club, for this was an organization closely guarded, and she knew all of the members. The newcomers sat near her, and though she would have preferred her seclusion to remain secluded, she could not help waiting, with a little motherly satisfaction, to hear them speak of her Anne, as strangers inevitably must.
And presently she smiled in the darkness, thinking herself rewarded; for a man’s voice, deeply impressed, inquired: “Who is that wonderful girl?”
In the light of the moment’s impending revelation, the mother’s smile upon Mrs. Cromwell’s half-parted tips, as she waited for the reply, becomes a little pathetic.
“Why, it’s Sallie, of course!”
This strange answer arrested Mrs. Cromwell’s smile, of which reluctant and mirthless vestiges remained for a moment or two before vanishing into the contours that mark an astounded disapproval. Then she slowly turned her head and looked at these queer visitors, and her strong impression was that the two middle-aged women and their escort, a stout elderly man in white flannels, were “very ordinary looking people.”
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 363