Renfrew’s case with his pretty neighbour was also weakened by the liking and approval of her father and mother, who made the mistake of frequently praising him to her; for when parents do this, with the daughter adverse, the poor lover is usually ruined — the reasons being obvious to everybody except the praising parents. Mrs. Eliot talked Renfrew Mears and his virtues at her daughter till the latter naturally declared that she hated him. “I do!” she said one morning. “I really do hate him, mamma!”
“What nonsense!” her mother exclaimed. “When I heard the two of you chatting together on the front porch for at least an hour, only last evening!”
“Chatting!” Muriel repeated scornfully. “Chatting together! That shows how much you observe, mamma! I don’t think he said more than a dozen words the whole evening.”
“Well, don’t you like a good listener?”
“Yes,” Muriel replied emphatically. “Indeed, I do! A good listener is one who understands what you’re saying. Renfrew Mears has just lately learned enough to keep quiet, for fear if he speaks at all, it’ll show he doesn’t understand anything!”
“Well, if he doesn’t, why did you talk to him?”
“Good gracious!” Muriel cried. “We can’t always express ourselves as we wish to in this life, mamma; I should think you’d know that by this time! I can’t throw rocks at him and say, ‘Go back home!’ every time he comes poking over here, can I? I have to be polite, even to Renfrew Mears, don’t you suppose?”
The mother, sighing, gave her daughter one of those little half-surreptitious glances in which mothers seem to review troubled scenes with their own mothers; then she said gently: “Your father and I do wish you could feel a little more kindly toward the poor boy, Muriel.”
“Well, I can’t, and I don’t want to. What’s more, I wouldn’t marry him if I did.”
“Not if you were in love?”
“Poor mamma!” Muriel said compassionately. “What has love to do with marrying? I expect to retain my freedom; I don’t propose to enter upon a period of child-rearing—”
“Oh, good gracious!” Mrs. Eliot cried. “What a way to talk!”
“But if I did,” Muriel continued, with some sharpness, “I should never select Renfrew Mears to be my assistant in the task. And as for what you call ‘love,’ it seems to me a rather unhealthy form of excitement that I’m not subject to, fortunately.”
“You are so queer,” her mother murmured; whereupon Muriel laughed.
No doubt her laughter was a little condescending. “Queer?” she said. “No — only modern. Only frank and wholesome! Thinking people look at life as it really is, nowadays, mamma. I am a child of the new age; but more than that, I am not the slave of my emotions; I am the product of my thinking. Unwholesome excitement and queer fancies have no part in my life, mamma.”
“I hope not,” her mother responded with a little spirit. “I’m not exactly urging anything unwholesome upon you, Muriel. You’re very inconsistent, it seems to me.”
“I!” Muriel said haughtily. “Inconsistent!”
“Why, when I just mention that your father and I’d be glad if you could feel a little kinder toward a good-looking, fine young man that we know all about, you begin talking, and pretty soon it sounds as though we were trying to get you to do something criminal! And then you go on to say you haven’t got any ‘queer fancies!’ Isn’t it a queer fancy to think we’d want you to do anything unhealthy or excited? That’s why I say you’re inconsistent.”
Muriel coloured; her breathing quickened; and her eyes became threateningly bright. “The one thing I won’t be called,” she said, “is ‘inconsistent!’”
“Well, but—”
“I won’t!” she cried, and choked. “You know it makes me furious; that’s why you do it!”
“Did I understand you to say you never permitted your emotions to control you?” her mother asked dryly.
In retort, Muriel turned to the closet where she kept her hats; for her favourite way of meeting these persecutions was to go out of the house abruptly, leaving her mother to occupy it in full remorse; but this time Mrs. Eliot forestalled her. A servant appeared in the doorway and summoned her: “There’s someone downstairs wants to see you; I took him in the library.”
“I’ll come,” said Mrs. Eliot, and with a single dignified glance at her daughter, she withdrew, leaving Muriel to digest a discomfiture. For the art of domestic altercation lies almost wholly in the withdrawal, since here the field is won by abandoning it. In family embroilments she proves herself right, and the others wrong, who adroitly seizes the proper moment to make an unexpected departure either with dignity or in tears. People under stress of genuine emotion have been known to practice this art, seeming thereby to indicate the incompatible presence of a cool dramatist somewhere in the back of their heads; yet where is there anything that is not incompatible? Muriel, injured by the word “inconsistent,” had meant to withdraw in silent pain, thus putting her mother in the wrong; but, in the sometimes invaluable argot of the race-course, Mrs. Eliot got away first. Muriel felt severely baffled.
There remained to her, however, a retreat somewhat enfeebled by her mother’s successful withdrawal: Mrs. Eliot had gone out of the room; Muriel could still go out of the house. Therefore she put on a hat, descended the stairs and went toward the front door in a manner intended to symbolize insulted pride taking a much more important departure than the mere walking out of a room.
Her mother, of course, was intended to see her pass the open double doors of the library, but Mrs. Eliot’s back happened to be toward these doors, and she was denied the moving picture of the daughter sweeping through the hall. The caller, however, suffered no such deprivation; he sat facing the doorway, and although Muriel did not look directly at him, she became aware of a distinguished presence. The library was shadowy, the hall much lighter; she passed the doors quickly; but she was almost startled by the impression made upon her by this young man whom she had never before seen. Then, as she went on toward the front door, she had suddenly a sensation queerly like dizziness; it seemed to her that this stranger had looked at her profoundly as she passed, and that the gaze he bent upon her had come from a pair of dark and glowing eyes.
She went out into the yard, but not, as she had intended, to the street; and turning the corner of the house, she crossed the sunny lawn to some hydrangea bushes in blossom, where she paused and stood, apparently in contemplation of the flowers. She was trembling a little, so strong was her queer consciousness of the stranger in the library and of his dark and glowing eyes. Such sensations as hers have often been described as “unreal;” that is to say, “she seemed to be in a dream.” Her own eyes had not fully encountered the dark and glowing ones, but never had any person made so odd and instantaneous an impression upon her. What else was she to conclude but that there must have been “something psychic” about it? And how, except by telepathy, could she have so suddenly found in her mind the conviction that the distinguished-looking young man was a painter? For to her own amazement, she was sure of this.
After a time she went back into the house, and again passed through the hall and by the open doors, but now her bearing was different. In a sweet, low voice she hummed a careless air from Naples, while in her arms she bore a sheaf of splendid hydrangea blossoms, thus offering, in the momentary framing of the broad doorway, a composition rich in colour and also of no mean decorative charm in contour, it may be said. “The Girl from the Garden” might have been the title she wished to suggest to a painter’s mind, but when she came into the view of her mother’s caller, consciousness of him increased all at once so overwhelmingly that she forgot herself. She had meant to pass the doorway with a cool leisureliness and entirely in profile — a Girl from the Garden with no other thought than to enliven her room with an armful of hydrangea blossoms — but she came almost to a halt midway, and, for the greater part of a second packed with drama, looked full upon the visitor.
He was one of those
black-and-white young men: clothes black, linen white, a black bow at the collar, thick black hair, the face of a fine pallor, and black eyes lustrously comprehending. What they must have comprehended now was at least a little of the significance of the arrested attitude beyond the doorway, and more than a little of what was meant by the dark and lustrous eyes that with such poignant inquiry met his own. For Muriel’s fairly shouted at him the startled question: “Who are you?”
Time, life and love are made of seconds and bits of seconds: Muriel had gone on, carrying her question clamouring down the hall with her, before this full second elapsed. She ran up the stairs and into her own room, dropped the hydrangeas upon a table, and in two strides confronted a mirror. A moment later she took up the hydrangeas again, with a care to hold them as she had held them in the hall below, then walked by the mirror, paused, gave the glass a deep, questioning look and went on. After that she seated herself beside an open window that commanded a view of the front gate, and waited, the great question occupying her tumultuously.
By this time the great question had grown definite, and of course it was, “Is this He?” Other questions came tumbling after it: How did she know he was a painter, this young man of whom she had never heard? It is only in the moving pictures that a doctor must look like a doctor, a judge like a judge, an anarchist like an anarchist, a painter like a painter; the age of machines, hygiene and single-type clothing has so blurred men into indistinguishability that only a few musicians still look like musicians, a feat accomplished simply by the slight impoverishment of barbers. The young man in the library was actually a painter, but Muriel may well have been amazed that she knew it; for nowadays it is a commonplace that a Major General in mufti may reasonably be taken for a plumber, while an unimportant person soliciting alms at the door is shown into the house under the impression that a Senator is calling.
Why (Muriel asked herself) had her mother not mentioned such an appointment? But perhaps there had been no appointment; perhaps he had called without one. What for? To ask permission to paint the daughter’s portrait? Had he seen her somewhere before to-day? Where did he live? In Paris?
The front door could be heard closing below, and she looked down upon a white straw hat with a black band. This hat moved quickly down the path to the gate, and the young stranger was disclosed beneath the hat: a manly figure with an elastic step. Outside the gate he paused, looking back thoughtfully with his remarkable eyes; and Muriel, who had instantly withdrawn into the concealment of a window-curtain, marked that this look of his had the quality of covering the whole front of the house at a glance. It was a look, moreover, that seemed to comprehend the type of the house and even to measure its dimensions — a look of the kind that “takes in everything,” as people say. Muriel trembled again. Did he say to himself: “This is Her house?” Did he think: “I should like to set my easel here by the gate and paint this house, because it is the house where She dwells”?
His pause at the gate was only a momentary one; he turned toward the region of commerce and hotels and walked quickly away, the intervening foliage of the trees almost immediately cutting him off from the observation of the girl at the window. Then she heard her mother coming up the stairs and through the upper hall; whereupon Muriel, still tremulous, began hastily to alter the position of the little silver implements upon her dressing-table, thus sketching a preoccupation with small housewifery, if Mrs. Eliot should come into the room. But to the daughter’s acute disappointment, the mother passed the open door without even looking in, and retired to her own apartment.
Muriel most urgently wished to follow her and shower her with questions: “Who is he? Isn’t he a painter? Why did he come to see you? What were you talking about? When is he coming again? What did he say when he saw me?” But remembering the terms upon which she and her mother had so recently parted, and that odious word “inconsistent,” Muriel could not bend to the intimacy of such a questioning. In fact, her own thought took the form, “I’d rather die!”
She turned to the window again, looked out at that gate so lately made significant by the passage of the stranger — and there was young Mr. Renfrew Mears, just coming in. He was a neat picture of a summer young gentleman for any girl’s eye; but to Muriel he was a too-familiar object, and just now about as interesting as a cup of tepid barley-water. She tried to move away before he saw her, but Renfrew had always a fatal quickness for seeing her. He called to her.
“Oh, Muriel!”
“Well — what?” she said reluctantly.
“There’s something I want to ask you about. Will you come down a few minutes?”
“Oh, well — I suppose so,” was her not too heartening response; but on the way downstairs a thought brightened her. Perhaps Renfrew might know something about a dark young man — a painter — lately come to town.
He was blank upon this subject, however, as she discovered when they had seated themselves upon a wicker settee on the veranda. “No,” he said. “I haven’t heard of any artist that’s come here lately. Where’d you hear about one?”
“Oh, around,” she said casually. “I’m not absolutely certain he’s an artist, but I got that idea somewhere. The reason I wanted to know is because I thought he might be one of the new group that have broken away, like Matisse and Gaugin.”
“Who?”
“Never mind. Haven’t you heard of anybody at all that’s a stranger here — visiting somebody, perhaps?”
“Not exactly,” Renfrew replied, thinking it over conscientiously. “I don’t believe I have, exactly.”
“What do you mean, you don’t think you have ‘exactly’?” she asked irritably. “Have you, or haven’t you?”
“Well,” he said, “my Aunt Milly from Burnetsville is visiting my cousins, the Thomases, but she’s an invalid and you probably wouldn’t—”
“No, I wouldn’t!” Muriel said. “Don’t strain your mind any more, Renfrew.”
“I could inquire around,” he suggested. “I thought it wouldn’t likely be my aunt, but you said ‘anybody at all.”’
“Never mind! What was it you wanted to ask me?”
“Well, it’s something that’s rather important, but of course maybe you won’t think so, Muriel. Anyway, though, I hope you’ll think it’s sort of important.”
“But what is it? Don’t hang fire so, Renfrew!”
“I just wanted to lead up to it a little,” he explained mildly. “I’ve been thinking about getting a new car, and I wondered what sort you think I’d better look at. I didn’t want to get one you wouldn’t like.”
Her lips parted to project that little series of sibilances commonly employed by adults to make children conscious of error. “Why on earth should you ask me?” she said sharply. “Is that your idea of an important question?”
Renfrew’s susceptible complexion showed an increase of colour, but he was growing more and more accustomed to be used as a doormat, and he responded, without rancour: “I meant I hoped you’d sort of think it important, my not wanting to get one you wouldn’t like.”
“Now, what do you mean by that?”
“Well,” he said, “I mean I hoped you’d think it was important, my thinking it was important to ask you.”
“I don’t,” she returned as a complete answer.
“You say—”
“I say I don’t,” she repeated. “I don’t. I don’t think it’s important. Isn’t that clear enough, Renfrew?”
“Yes,” he said, and looked plaintively away from her. “I guess I don’t need any new car.”
“Is there anything more this morning?” she was cruel enough to inquire.
“No,” he answered, rising. “I guess that’s all.” Then, having received another of his almost daily rejections, he went away, leaving her to watch his departing figure with some exasperation, though she might well have admired him for his ingenuity: every day or two he invented a new way of proposing to her. In comparison, her refusals were commonplace, but of course she neith
er realized that nor cared to be brilliant for Renfrew; and also, this was a poor hour for him, when the electric presence of the black-and-white stranger was still vibrant in the very air. Muriel returned to her room and put the hydrangeas in a big silver vase; she moved them gently, with a touch both reverent and caressing, for they had borne a part in a fateful scene, and already she felt it possible that in the after years she would never see hydrangeas in blossom without remembering to-day and the First Meeting.
Impulsively she went to her desk and wrote:
“Is it true that You have come? My hand trembles, and I know that if I spoke to my mother about You, my voice would tremble. Oh, I could never ask her a question about You! A moment ago I sat upon the veranda with a dull man who wants to marry me. It seemed a desecration to listen to him — an offense to You! He has always bored me. How much more terribly he bored me when perhaps I had just seen You for the first time in my life! Perhaps it is not for the first time in eternity, though! Was I ever a Queen in Egypt and were You a Persian sculptor? Did we meet in Ephesus once?
“It is a miracle that we should meet at all. I might have lived in another century — or on another planet! Should we then have gone seeking, seeking one another always vainly? All my life I have been waiting for You. Always I have known that I was waiting, but until to-day I did not know it was for just You. My whole being trembled when I saw You — if it was You? I am trembling now as I think of You, as I write of You — write to You! A new life has possibly begun for me in this hour!
“And some day will I show You this writing? That thought is like fire and like ice. I burn with it and freeze with it, in terror of You! See! Here is my heart opened, like a book for your reading! —
“Oh, is it, is it You? I think that You are a painter; that is all I know of You — and why do I think it? It came to me as I stood in a garden, thrilling with my first quick glimpse of You. Was that the proof of our destiny, yours and mine? Yes, the miracle of my knowing that You are a painter when I do not even know your name — that is the answer! It must be You! I tremble with excitement as I write that word ‘You’ which has suddenly leaped into such fiery life and meaning: I tremble and I could weep! Oh, You — You — You! Is it?”
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 513