Twice, during the latter phases of this somewhat hasty record of ardour, she had been summoned to lunch, and after hurrying the final words upon the page, she put the paper into a notebook and locked it inside her desk. Then she descended the stairs and went toward the dining-room, but halted suddenly, unseen, outside the door She had caught the word “painter,” spoken by her father.
“Well, I’m glad you liked that painter.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Eliot said. “I talked it over with him, and I’m afraid he agreed with you instead of with me. Naturally, he would, though! I was quite interested in him.”
“You were?”
“Yes — such an unexpected type.”
“Well, no,” Mr. Eliot said. “Nobody’s an unexpected type nowadays. Isn’t Muriel coming down at all?”
“Jennie’s been up for her twice,” his wife informed him. “I suppose she’ll come eventually. She’s cross this morning.”
“What about?”
“Oh, I just asked her if she couldn’t be a little fairer to a certain somebody. I suppose I’d better not have mentioned it, because it made her very peevish.”
Upon this, Muriel made her entrance swiftly enough to let her mother know that the last words had been overheard, an advantage the daughter could not forego. She took her place at the table opposite to her gourmandizing little brother Robert, and in silence permitted her facial expression alone to mention what she thought of a mother who called her “peevish” when she was not present to defend herself.
Only a moment before, she had been thrilled inexpressibly: the black-and-white stranger, so mysteriously spoken of by her parents, was indeed a painter. That proved his You-ness, proved everything! Her whole being (as she would have said) shook with the revelation, and her anxiety to hear more of him was consuming; but the word “peevish” brought about an instantaneous reversion. She entered the dining-room in an entirely different mood, for her whole being was now that of a daughter embattled with a parent who attacks unfairly — so intricately elastic are the ways of our whole beings!
Mrs. Eliot offered only the defense of a patient smile; Mr. Eliot looked puzzled and oppressed; and for a time there was no conversation during the further progress of this uncomfortable meal. Nothing was to be heard in the room except the movements of a servant and the audible eating of fat little Robert, who was incurably natural with his food.
It was Muriel who finally decided to speak. “I’m sorry to have interrupted your conversation,” she said frostily. “Perhaps, though, you’d prefer not to say any more about me to papa and Robert while I’m here to explain what really happened, mamma.”
“Oh, nonsense!” Mr. Eliot said. “I suppose even the Pope gets ‘peevish’ now and then; it’s no deadly insult to say a person got a little peevish. We weren’t having a ‘conversation’ about you at all. We were talking about other matters, and just barely mentioned you.”
Muriel looked at him quickly. “What other things were you talking about?”
He laughed. “My! How suspicious you are!”
“Not at all; I simply asked you what other things you were talking about.”
Instead of replying, “About a distinguished young painter who saw you on the street and wants to paint your portrait,” Mr. Eliot laughed again and rose, having finished his coffee. He came round the table to her and pinched her ear on his way to the door. “Good gracious!” he said. “Don’t you suppose your mother and I ever talk about anything except what a naughty daughter we have?” And with that he departed. Mrs. Eliot said, “Excuse me,” rather coldly to Muriel, followed him to the front door, and failed to return.
Muriel did not see her mother again during the afternoon, and in the evening Mr and Mrs. Eliot went out to a dinner of their bridge-club, leaving their daughter to dine in the too audible company of Robert. She dressed exquisitely, though not for Robert, whose naturalness at the table brought several annoyed glances from her. “Can’t you manage it more quietly, Robert?” she asked at last, with the dessert. “Try!”
“Whaffor?” he inquired.
“Only because it’s so hideous!”
“Oh, hush!” he said rudely, and, being offended, became more natural than ever, on purpose.
She sighed. With the falling of the dusk, her whole being, not antagonized by her mother’s presence, had become an uplifted and mysterious expectation; and the sounds made by the gross child Robert were not to be borne. She left the table, went out into the starlight, and stood by the hydrangeas, an ethereal figure in draperies of mist.
“Oh, You!” she whispered, and let a bare arm be caressed by the clumps of great blossoms. “When are you coming again, You? To-night?”
She quivered with the sense of impending drama; it seemed to her certain that the next moment she would see him — that he would come to her out of the darkness. The young painter should have done so; he should have stepped out of the vague night-shadows, a poetic and wistful figure, melancholy with mystery yet ineffably radiant. “Mademoiselle, step lightly!” he should have said. “Do you not see the heart beneath your slipper? It was mine until I threw it there!”
“Ah, You!” she murmured to the languorous hydrangeas.
At such a moment the sound of peanuts being eaten, shells and all, could not fail to prove inharmonious. She shivered with the sudden anguish of a dislocated mood; but she was Robert’s next of available kin and recognized a duty. She crossed the lawn to the veranda, where he sat, busy with a small paper sack upon his knee.
“Robert! Stop that!”
“I ain’t doin’ anything,” he said crossly.
“You are. What do you mean, eating peanuts when you’ve just finished an enormous dinner?”
“Well, what hurt is that?”
“And with the shells on!” she cried.
“Makes more to ’em,” he explained.
“Stop it!”
“I won’t,” Robert said doggedly. “I’m goin’ to do what I please to-night, no matter how much trouble I get into to-morrow!”
“What ‘trouble’ do you expect to-morrow?”
“Didn’t you hear about it?” he asked. “Papa and mamma were talkin’ about it at lunch.”
“I didn’t hear them.”
“I guess it was before you came down,” Robert said; and then he gave her a surprise. “The painter was here this morning, and they got it all fixed up.” Muriel moved back from him a step, and inexplicably a dismal foreboding took her. “What?” she said.
“Well, the thing that bothers me is simply this,” Robert informed her: “He told mamma he’d have to bring his little boy along and let him play around here as long as the work went on. He said he has to take this boy along with him, because his wife’s a dentist’s ‘sistant and can’t keep him around a dentist office, and they haven’t got any place to leave him. He’s about nine years old, and I’ll bet anything I have trouble with him before the day’s over.”
“Do you mean the — the painter is married, Robert?”
“Yes, and got this boy,” Robert said, shaking his head. “I bet I do have trouble with him, if he’s got to be around here until they get three coats o’ paint on our house. Mamma thought they only needed two, but papa said three, and the painter talked mamma into it this morning.”
“The house?” Muriel said. “We’re going to have the — the house painted?”
Robert was rather surprised. “Why, don’t you remember how much papa and mamma were talkin’ about it, two or three weeks ago? And then they thought not and didn’t say so much about it, but for a while papa was goin’ to have every painter in town come up here and make a bid. Don’t you remember?”
“I do now,” Muriel said feebly; and a moment later she glanced toward the bright windows of the house across the street. “Robert,” she said, “if you’ve finished those horrible peanuts, you might run and ask Mr. Renfrew Mears if he’d mind coming over a little while.”
She had been deeply stirred by the subject that had o
ccupied her all day, and it was a spiritual necessity for her (so to say) to continue upon the topic with somebody — even with Renfrew Mears! However, she rejected him again, though with a much greater consideration for his feelings than was customary; and when he departed, she called after him:
“Look out for your clothes when you come over to-morrow. We’re going to have the house painted.” Then, smiling contentedly, she went indoors and up to her room. The great vase of hydrangeas stood upon a table; she looked at it absently, and was reminded of something. She took some sheets of written paper from a notebook in her desk, tossed them into a waste-basket, yawned, and went to bed.
US
HIGHLAND PLACE” WAS one of those new little cross-streets in a new little bosky neighbourhood, that had “grown up over night,” as we say, meaning grown up in four or five years; so that when citizens of the older and more solid and soiled central parts of the city come driving through the new part, of a Sunday afternoon in spring, they are pleased to be surprised. “My goodness!” they exclaim. “When did all this happen? Why, it doesn’t seem more’n a year or so since we used to have Fourth o’ July picnics out here! And now just look at it — all built up with bride-and-groom houses!”
“Highland Place” was the name given to this cross-street by the speculative land company that “developed” it, and they did not call it “Waverley Place” because they had already produced a “Waverley Place” a block below. Both “Places” were lined with green-trimmed small white houses, “frame” or stucco; and although the honeymoon suggestion was architecturally so strong, as a matter of fact most of the inhabitants held themselves to be “settled old married people,” some of the couples having almost attained to a Tin Wedding Anniversary.
The largest of the houses in “Highland Place” was the “hollow-tile and stucco residence of Mr and Mrs. George M. Sullender.” Thus it had been defined, under a photographic reproduction, with the caption “New Highland Place Sullender Home,” in one of the newspapers, not long after the little street had been staked out and paved; and since the “Sullender Home” was not only the largest house but the first to be built in the “Place,” and had its picture in the paper, it naturally took itself for granted as being the most important.
Young Mrs. William Sperry, whose equally young husband had just bought the smallest but most conspicuously bride-and-groom cottage in the whole “Place,” was not so deeply impressed with the Sullender importance as she should have been, since the Sperrys were the newcomers of the neighbourhood, had not yet been admitted to its intimacies, and might well have displayed a more amiable deference to what is established.
“No,” Mrs. Sperry said to her husband, when they got home after their first experience of the “Place’s” hospitality, a bridge-party at the Sullenders’— “I just can’t stand those people, Will. They’re really awful!”
“Why, what’s the matter with ’em?” he inquired. “I thought they were first rate. They seemed perfectly friendly and hospitable and—”
“Oh, yes! Lord and Lady of the Manor entertaining the tenantry! I don’t mind being tenantry,” young Mrs. Sperry explained; “but I can’t stand the Lord-and-Lady-of-the-Manor style in people with a nine-room house and a one-car garage.”
“It may be one-car,” her husband laughed; “but it has two stories. They have a chauffeur, you know, and he lives in the upstairs of the garage.”
“So that entitles the Sullenders to the Manor style?”
“But I didn’t notice any of that style,” he protested. “I thought they seemed right nice and cordial. Of course Sullender feels that he’s been making quite a success in business and it naturally gives him a rather condescending air, but he’s really all right.”
“He certainly was condescending,” she grumbled, and went on with some satire: “Did you hear him allude to himself as a ‘Realtor?’”
“Well, why shouldn’t he? He is one. That’s his business.”
“My Lord the Realtor!” Mrs. Sperry cried mockingly. “There ought to be an opera written called ‘Il Realtor’ like the one there used to be with the title ‘Il Janitor.’ Those are such romantic words! ‘Toreador,’
‘Realtor,’
‘Humidor’—”
“Here, here!” her husband said. “Calm down! You seem to have got yourself worked up into a mighty sarcastic mood for some reason. Those people only want to be nice to us and they’re all right.”
Mrs. Sperry looked at him coldly. “Did you hear Mr. Sullender saying that his company had sold seven ‘homes’ this month?” she inquired.
“Oh, you can’t expect everybody to know all the purist niceties of the English language,” he said. “Sullender’s all right and his wife struck me as one of the nicest, kindest women I ever—”
“Kind!” Mrs. Sperry echoed loudly. “She doesn’t stop at being ‘kind’! She’s so caressingly tender, so angelically loving, that she can’t possibly pronounce a one-syllabled word without making two syllables of it! Did you notice that she said ‘yay-yus’ for ‘yes’, and ‘no-oh’ for ‘no’? I do hate the turtle-dove style of talking, and I never met a worse case of it. Mrs. Sullender’s the sweetest sweet-woman I ever saw in my life and I’m positive she leads her husband a dog’s life!”
“What nonsense!”
“It serves him right for his Realtoring, though,” Mrs. Sperry added thoughtfully. “He ought to have that kind of a wife!”
“But you just said she was the sweetest—”
“Yes, the sweetest sweet-woman I ever saw. I do hate the whole clan of sweet-women!”
The young husband looked perplexed. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he admitted. “I always thought—”
“I’m talking about the sweet-woman type that Mrs. Sullender belongs to. They use intended sweetness. They speak to total strangers with sweetness. They wear expressions of saintly sweetness. Everybody speaks of a sweet-woman with exquisitely self-sacrificing reasons for every action of their lives; but they do just exactly what they want to do, and everybody else has to do what a sweet-woman wants him to. That’s why I’m sure Mr. Sullender, in spite of all his pomposity, leads a dog’s life at home.”
“Of all the foolish talk!” young Sperry exclaimed.
“Why, everybody says they’re the most ideally married couple and that they lead the happiest life together that—”
“‘Everybody says!”’ she mocked him, interrupting. “How often have you known what ‘everybody says’ turn out to be the truth about anything? And besides, we don’t know a thing about any of these people, and we don’t know anybody else that does! Who is this ‘everybody’ that’s told you how happy the Sullenders are?”
“Well, it’s just a general impression I got,” he admitted. “I think I heard someone down-town alluding to Sullender’s domestic relations being very fortunate and pleasant.”
“Oh, you think so? Is that all? You don’t really know a thing about it, then.”
“No matter. You’re wrong this time, Bella. The Sullenders—”
But Bella shook her pretty young head, interrupting him again. “You’ll see! I do hope there won’t have to be too much intimacy but you can’t live across the street from people very long, in a neighbourhood like this, without getting to know the real truth about ’em. You wait and see what we get to know about the Sullenders!”
“Yes, I’ll wait,” he laughed. “But how long?”
“Oh, I don’t know; maybe a year, maybe a month—”
“Let’s make it a month, Bella,” he said, and put his arm about her. “If we don’t find out in a month that the Sullenders are miserable together, will you admit you’re wrong?”
“No, I won’t! But you’ll probably have to admit that I’m right before that long. I have a sense for these things, Will, and I never go wrong when I trust it. Women know intuitively things that men never suspect. I know I’m right about Mrs. Sullender.” Her husband permitted the discussion to end with this, wisely fearin
g that if he sought further to defend his position Bella might plausibly accuse him of “always insisting upon the last word.” And so, for that night, at least, the matter was dropped from their conversation, though not from the thoughts of Mrs. Sperry. Truth to tell, she was what is sometimes called an “obstinate little body,” and, also, she appreciated the advisability of a young wife’s building for future and lifelong use the foundations of infallibility. That is to say, she was young and therefore inexperienced, but she had foresight.
Moreover, she had attentively observed the matrimonial condition of her parents and aunts and uncles. Many and many a time had she heard a middle-aged husband speak to his wife of like years somewhat in this manner: “No, Fannie, you’re wrong again. You’re mistaken about this now, just as you were about James Thompson’s adding machine in 1897. And you were wrong about painting the house, the year after that, too. Don’t you remember how you insisted dark green was the right colour, and finally had to admit, yourself, that dark green was awful, and light yellow would have been just right, as I all along said it would?”
Thus, young Mrs. Sperry, looking to times far ahead, had determined to be wrong about nothing whatever during these early years of her matrimony. Moreover, since argument had arisen concerning the Sullenders, she had made up her mind to be right about them, and to “prove” herself right, “whether she really was or not!” And that is why, on the morning after her arraignment of sweet-women generally, and of her too gracious neighbour particularly, the pretty newcomer in “Highland Place” found herself most pleasurably excited by the naïve but sinister revelations of a stranger eight years of age.
At a little before nine o’clock, Mr. William Sperry had departed (in a young husband’s car) for his place of business, some five miles distant in the smoky heart of the city; and not long afterward the thoughtful Bella, charmingly accoutred as a gardener, came forth with a trowel to uproot weeds that threatened a row of iris she had set out along the gravel path leading from the tiny white veranda to the white picket gate. Thus engaged, she became aware of a small presence fumbling at the latch of this gate, and she changed her position from that of one on all fours, who gropes intently in the earth, to that of one upright from the knees, but momentarily relaxed.
Collected Works of Booth Tarkington Page 514