Cornelia blushed the splendid red of a brunette. “There it is, Mrs. Burton! That’s what’s always in everybody’s mind about a girl when she wants to do something. It’s what a magnificent match she’ll make by her painting or singing or acting! And if the poor fool only knew, she needn’t draw or sing or act, to do that.”
“A person would think you’d been through the wars, Cornelia,” said her mother.
“I don’t care! It’s a shame!”
“It is a shame, Nelie,” said Mrs. Burton, soothingly; and she added, unguardedly, “and I told Mr. Ludlow so, when he spoke about a girl’s being happily married, as if there was no other happiness for a girl.”
“Oh! He thinks that, does he?”
“No, of course, he doesn’t. He has a very high ideal of women; but he was just running on, in the usual way. He told afterwards how hard the girl art-students work in New York, and go ahead of the young men, some of them — where they have the strength. The only thing is that so few of them have the strength. That’s what he meant.”
“What do you think, mother?” asked the girl with an abrupt turn toward her. “Do you think I’d break down?”
“I guess if you didn’t break down teaching school, that you hated, you won’t break down studying art, when you love it so.”
“Well,” Cornelia said, with the air of putting an end to the audience, “I guess there’s no great hurry about it.”
She let her mother follow Mrs. Burton out, recognizing with a smile of scornful intelligence the ladies’ wish to have the last word about her to themselves.
VIII.
“I don’t know as I ever saw her let herself go so far before,” said Mrs. Saunders, leaning on the top of the closed gate, and speaking across it to Mrs. Burton on the outside of the fence. “I guess she’s thinking about it, pretty seriously. She’s got money enough, and more than enough.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Burton, “I’m going to write to Mr. Ludlow about it, as soon as I get home, and I know I can get him to say something that’ll decide her.”
“So do!” cried Mrs. Saunders, delighted.
She lingered awhile talking of other things, so as to enable herself to meet Cornelia with due unconsciousness when she returned to her.
“Have you been talking me over all this time, mother?” the girl asked.
“We didn’t hardly say a word about you,” said her mother, and now she saw what a good thing it was that she had staid and talked impersonalities with Mrs. Burton.
“Well, one thing I know,” said the girl, “if she gets that Mr. Ludlow to encourage me, I’ll never go near New York in the world.”
Mrs. Saunders escaped into the next room, and answered back from that safe distance, “I guess you’d better get her to tell you what she’s going to do.”
When she returned, the girl stood looking dreamily out of the little crooked panes of the low window. She asked, with her back to her mother, “What would you do, if I went?”
“Oh, I should get along,” said Mrs. Saunders with the lazy piety which had never yet found Providence to fail it. “I should get Miss Snively to go in with me, here. She ain’t making out very well, alone, and she could be company to me in more ways than one.”
“Yes,” said the girl, in a deep sigh. “I thought of her.” She faced about.
“Why, land, child!” cried her mother, “what’s the matter?”
Cornelia’s eyes were streaming with tears, and the passion in her heart was twisting her face with its anguish. She flung her arms round her mother’s neck, and sobbed on her breast. “Oh, I’m going, I’m going, and you don’t seem to care whether I go or stay, and it’ll kill me to leave you.”
Mrs. Saunders smiled across the tempest of grief in her embrace, at her own tranquil image in the glass, and took it into the joke. “Well, you ain’t going to leave this minute,” she said, smoothing the girl’s black hair. “And I don’t really care if you never go, Nie. You mustn’t go on my account.”
“Don’t you want me to?”
“Not unless you do.”
“And you don’t care whether I’m ever an artist or not?”
“What good is your being an artist going to do me?” asked her mother, still with a joking eye on herself in the mirror.
“And I’m perfectly free to go or to stay, as far as your wish is concerned?”
“Well!” said Mrs. Saunders, with insincere scorn of the question.
The girl gave her a fierce hug; she straightened herself up, and dashed the water from her eyes. “Well, then,” she said, “I’ll see. But promise me one thing, mother.”
“What is it?”
“That you won’t ask me a single thing about it, from this out, if I never decide!”
“Well, I won’t, Nie. I promise you that. I don’t want to drive you to anything. And I guess you know ten times as well what you want to do, as I do, anyway. I ain’t going to worry you.”
Three weeks later, just before fair time, Cornelia went to see Mrs. Burton. It was warm, and Mrs. Burton brought out a fan for her on the piazza.
“Oh, I’m not hot,” said Cornelia. “Mrs. Burton, I’ve made up my mind to go to New York this winter, and study art.”
“I knew you would, Nie!” Mrs. Burton exulted.
“Yes. I’ve thought it all out. I’ve got the money, now. I keep wanting to paint, and I don’t know whether I can or not, and the only way is to go and find out. It’ll be easy enough to come home. I’ll keep money enough to pay my way back.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Burton, “it’s the only way. But I guess you’ll find out you can paint fast enough. It’s a pretty good sign you can, if you want to.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Some girls want to write poetry awfully, and can’t. Mrs. Burton,” she broke off, with a nervous laugh, “I don’t suppose you expect that Mr. Ludlow out to the fair this year?”
“No, Nelie, I don’t,” said Mrs. Burton, with tender reluctance.
“Because,” said the girl with another laugh, “he might save me a trip to New York, if he could see my drawings.” Something, she did not know what, in Mrs. Burton’s manner, made her ask: “Have you heard from him lately? Perhaps he’s given it up, too!”
“Oh, no!” sighed Mrs. Burton, with a break from her cheerfulness with Cornelia, which set its voluntary character in evidence to the girl’s keen, young perception. “But he seemed to be rather discouraged about the prospects of artists when he wrote.” She was afraid Cornelia might ask her when he had written. “He seemed to think the ranks were very full. He’s a very changeable person. He’s always talked, before now, about there being plenty of room at the top.”
“Well, that’s where I expect to be,” said the girl, smiling but trembling. She turned the talk, and soon rose to go, ignoring to the last Mrs. Burton’s forced efforts to recur to her plan of studying art in New York. Now she said: “Mrs. Burton, there’s one thing I’d like to ask you,” and she lifted her eyes upon her with a suddenness that almost made Mrs. Burton jump.
“What is it, Nelie?”
“You’ve always been so good to me — and — and taken such an interest, that I’m afraid — I thought you might try — I want you to promise me you won’t write to Mr. Ludlow about me, or ask him to do the least thing, for me!”
“I won’t, I won’t indeed, Nelie!” Mrs. Burton promised with grateful perfervor.
“Because,” said the girl, taking her skirt in her left hand, preparatory to lifting it for her descent of the piazza steps, “now that I’ve made up my mind, I don’t want to be discouraged, and I don’t want to be helped. If I can’t do for myself, I won’t be done for.”
After she got down through the maples, and well out of the gate, Burton came and stood in the hall door-way, with his pipe in his mouth. “Saved your distance, Polly, as usual; saved your distance.”
“What would you have done?” retorted his wife.
“I should have told her that I’d just got a letter from Ludlow this morni
ng, and that he begged and entreated me by everything I held dear, to keep the poor girl from coming to New York, and throwing away her time and health and money.”
“You wouldn’t!” cried Mrs. Burton. “You wouldn’t have done anything of the kind. It would have made her perfectly hate him.”
Burton found his pipe out. He lighted a match and hollowed his hands over it above the pipe, to keep it from the draught. “Well,” he said, avoiding the point in controversy, “why shouldn’t she perfectly hate him?”
IX.
September was theoretically always a very busy month with Mrs. Saunders. She believed that she devoted it to activities which she called her fall work, and that she pressed forward in the fulfilments of these duties with a vigor inspired by the cool, clear weather. But in reality there was not much less folding of the hands with her in September than there was in July. She was apt, on the coolest and clearest September day, to drop into a chair with a deep drawn “Oh, hum!” after the fatigue of bringing in an apronful of apples, or driving the hens away from her chrysanthemums, and she spent a good deal of time wondering how, with all she had to do, she was ever going to get those flowers in before the frost caught them. At one of these times, sitting up slim, graceful and picturesque, in the feather-cushioned rocker-lounge, and fanning her comely face with her shade-hat, it occurred to her to say to Cornelia, sewing hard beside the window, “I guess you won’t see them in blossom this Christmas, Nie.”
“Not unless you cut them at the roots and send them to me by mail to look at,” said the girl.
Her mother laughed easily. “Well, I must really take hold and help you, or you’ll never get away. I’ve put off everybody else’s work, till it’s perfectly scandalous, and I’m afraid they’ll bring the roof about my ears, and yet I seem to be letting you do all your sewing. Well, one thing, I presume I hate to have you go so!”
“Mother!” cried the girl, drawing out her needle to the full length of her thread before she let her hand drop nervelessly at her side, and she fell back to look fixedly at Mrs. Saunders. “If that’s the way you feel!”
“I don’t! I want you to go just as much as ever I did. But looking at you there, just against the window, that way, I got to thinking you wouldn’t be there a great while; and — —” Mrs. Saunders caught her breath, and was mute a moment before she gave way and began to whimper. From the force of habit she tried to whimper with one side of her mouth, as she smiled, to keep her missing teeth from showing; and at the sight of this characteristic effort, so familiar and so full of long association, Cornelia’s heart melted within her, and she ran to her mother, and pulled her head down on her breast and covered the unwhimpering cheek with kisses.
“Don’t you suppose I think of that, too, mother? And when you go round the room, or out in the yard, I just keep following you as if I was magnetized, and I can see you with my eyes shut as well as I can with them open; and I know how I shall feel when that’s all I’ve got of you! But I’ll soon be back! Why I’ll be here in June again! And it’s no use, now. I’ve got to go.”
“Oh, yes,” said her mother, pushing herself free, and entering upon so prolonged a search for her handkerchief that her tears had almost time to dry without it before she found it. “But that don’t make it any easier, child.”
They had agreed from the time Cornelia made up her mind to go, and they had vowed the Burtons to secrecy, that they were not to tell any one till just before she started; but it was not in Mrs. Saunders’s nature or the nature of things, that she should keep her part of the agreement. She was so proud of Cornelia’s going to study art in New York, and going on her own money, that she would have told all her customers that she was going, even if it had not proved such a good excuse for postponing and delaying the work they brought her.
It was all over town before the first week was out, and the fact had been canvassed in and out of the presence of the principals, with much the same frankness. What Cornelia had in excess of a putting-down pride her mother correspondingly lacked; what the girl forbade, Mrs. Saunders invited by her manner, and there were not many people, or at least many ladies, in Pymantoning, who could not put their hands on their hearts and truly declare that they had spoken their minds as freely to Mrs. Saunders as they had to anybody.
As the time drew near Mrs. Burton begged to be allowed to ask Mr. Ludlow about a boarding-place for Cornelia; and to this Cornelia consented on condition that he should be strictly prohibited from taking any more trouble than simply writing the address on a piece of paper. When Mrs. Burton brought it she confessed that Mr. Ludlow seemed to have so far exceeded his instructions as to have inquired the price of board in a single room.
“I’m afraid, Nelie, it’s more than you expected. But everything is very dear in New York, and Mr. Ludlow thought it was cheap. There’s no fire in the room, even at that, but if you leave the door open when you’re out, it heats nicely from the hall. It’s over the door, four flights up; it’s what they call a side room.”
“How much is it, Mrs. Burton?” Cornelia asked, steadily; but she held her breath till the answer came.
“It’s seven dollars a week.”
“Well, the land!” said Mrs. Saunders, for all comment on the extortionate figure.
For a moment Cornelia did not say anything. Then she quietly remarked, “I can be home all the sooner,” and she took the paper which Ludlow had written the address on; she noticed that it smelt of tobacco smoke.
“He said you could easily find your way from the Grand Central Depot by the street cars; it’s almost straight. He’s written down on the back which cars you take. You give your check to the baggage expressman that comes aboard the train before you get in, and then you don’t have the least trouble. He says there are several girl art-students in the same house, and you’ll soon feel at home. He says if you feel the least timid about getting in alone, he’ll come with a lady friend of his, to meet you, and she’ll take you to your boarding-house.”
Mrs. Burton escaped with rather more than her life from the transmission of this offer. Cornelia even said, “I’m very much obliged to him, I’m sure. But I shouldn’t wish to trouble him, thank you. I won’t feel the least timid.”
But her mother followed Mrs. Burton out to the gate, as usual. “I guess,” Mrs. Saunders explained, “she hated to have him make so much to-do about it. What makes him want to bring a lady friend to meet her? Somebody he’s engaged to?”
“Well, that’s what I wondered, at first,” said Mrs. Burton. “But then when I came to think how very different the customs are in New York, I came to the conclusion that he did it on Cornelia’s account. If he was to take her to the boarding-house himself, they might think he was engaged to her.”
“Well!” said Mrs. Saunders.
“You may be sure it’s because he’s good and thoughtful about it, and wants her not to have any embarrassment.”
“Oh, I guess he’s all right,” said Mrs. Saunders. “But who’d ever have thought of having to take such precautions? I shouldn’t think life was worth having on such terms, if I was a girl.”
She told Cornelia about this strange social ceremony of chaperonage, which now for the first time practically concerned them.
X.
The night began to fall an hour before Cornelia’s train reached New York, and it drew into the station, through the whirl and dance of parti-colored lights everywhere.
The black porter of the sleeping-ear caught up her bag and carried it out for her, as if he were going to carry it indefinitely; and outside she stood letting him hold it, while she looked about her, scared and bewildered, and the passengers hurrying by, pushed and bumped against her. When she collected her wits sufficiently to take it from him, she pressed on with the rest up toward the front of the station where the crowd frayed out in different directions. At the open doorway giving on the street she stopped, and stood holding her bag, and gazed fearfully out on a line of wild men on the curbstone; they all seemed to be stretching
their hands out to her, and they rattled and clamored: “Keb? A keb, a keb, a keb? Want a keb? Keb here! Keb? A keb, a keb, a keb!” They were kept back by a policeman who prevented them from falling upon the passengers, and restored them to order when they yielded by the half-dozen to the fancy that some one had ordered a cab, and started off in the direction of their vehicles, and then rushed back so as not to lose other chances. The sight of Cornelia standing bag in hand there, seemed to drive them to a frenzy of hope; several newsboys, eager to share their prosperity, rushed up and offered her the evening papers.
Cornelia strained forward from the doorway and tried to make out, in the kaleidoscopic pattern of lights, which was the Fourth Avenue car; the street was full of cars and carts and carriages, all going every which way, with a din of bells, and wheels and hoofs that was as if crushed to one clangerous mass by the superior uproar of the railroad trains coming and going on a sort of street-roof overhead. A sickening odor came from the mud of the gutters and the horses and people, and as if a wave of repulsion had struck against every sense in her, the girl turned and fled from the sight and sound and smell of it all into the ladies’ waiting-room at her right.
She knew about that room from Mrs. Burton, who had said she could go in there, and fix her hair if it had got tumbled, when she came off the train. But it had been so easy to keep everything just right in the nice dressing-room on the sleeper that she had expected to step out of the station and take a Fourth Avenue car without going into the ladies-room. She found herself the only person in it, except a comfortable, friendly-looking, middle-aged woman, who seemed to be in charge of the place, and was going about with a dust-cloth in her hand. She had such a home-like air, and it was so peaceful there, after all that uproar outside, that Cornelia could hardly keep back the tears, though she knew it was silly, and kept saying so to herself under her breath.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 540