The seated woman turned her head round and up, and asked the woman behind her chair: “Who did you say?”
Editha, if she had done what she expected of herself, would have gone down on her knees at the feet of the seated figure and said, “I am George’s Editha,” for answer.
But instead of her own voice she heard that other woman’s voice, saying: “Well, I don’t know as I did get the name just right. I guess I’ll have to make a little more light in here,” and she went and pushed two of the shutters ajar.
Then Editha’s father said, in his public will-now-address-a-few-remarks tone: “My name is Balcom, ma’am — Junius H. Balcom, of Balcom’s Works, New York; my daughter—”
“Oh!” the seated woman broke in, with a powerful voice, the voice that always surprised Editha from Gearson’s slender frame. “Let me see you. Stand round where the light can strike on your face,” and Editha dumbly obeyed. “So, you’re Editha Balcom,” she sighed.
“Yes,” Editha said, more like a culprit than a comforter.
“What did you come for?” Mrs. Gearson asked.
Editha’s face quivered and her knees shook. “I came — because — because George—” She could go no further.
“Yes,” the mother said, “he told me he had asked you to come if he got killed. You didn’t expect that, I suppose, when you sent him.”
“I would rather have died myself than done it!” Editha said, with more truth in her deep voice than she ordinarily found in it. “I tried to leave him free—”
“Yes, that letter of yours, that came back with his other things, left him free.”
Editha saw now where George’s irony came from.
“It was not to be read before — unless — until — I told him so,” she faltered.
“Of course, he wouldn’t read a letter of yours, under the circumstances, till he thought you wanted him to. Been sick?” the woman abruptly demanded.
“Very sick,” Editha said, with self-pity.
“Daughter’s life,” her father interposed, “was almost despaired of, at one time.”
Mrs. Gearson gave him no heed. “I suppose you would have been glad to die, such a brave person as you! I don’t believe he was glad to die. He was always a timid boy, that way; he was afraid of a good many things; but if he was afraid he did what he made up his mind to. I suppose he made up his mind to go, but I knew what it cost him by what it cost me when I heard of it. I had been through one war before. When you sent him you didn’t expect he would get killed.”
The voice seemed to compassionate Editha, and it was time. “No,” she huskily murmured.
“No, girls don’t; women don’t, when they give their men up to their country. They think they’ll come marching back, somehow, just as gay as they went, or if it’s an empty sleeve, or even an empty pantaloon, it’s all the more glory, and they’re so much the prouder of them, poor things!”
The tears began to run down Editha’s face; she had not wept till then; but it was now such a relief to be understood that the tears came.
“No, you didn’t expect him to get killed,” Mrs. Gearson repeated, in a voice which was startlingly like George’s again. “You just expected him to kill some one else, some of those foreigners, that weren’t there because they had any say about it, but because they had to be there, poor wretches — conscripts, or whatever they call ‘em. You thought it would be all right for my George, your George, to kill the sons of those miserable mothers and the husbands of those girls that you would never see the faces of.” The woman lifted her powerful voice in a psalmlike note. “I thank my God he didn’t live to do it! I thank my God they killed him first, and that he ain’t livin’ with their blood on his hands!” She dropped her eyes, which she had raised with her voice, and glared at Editha. “What you got that black on for?” She lifted herself by her powerful arms so high that her helpless body seemed to hang limp its full length. “Take it off, take it off, before I tear it from your back!”
The lady who was passing the summer near Balcom’s Works was sketching Editha’s beauty, which lent itself wonderfully to the effects of a colorist. It had come to that confidence which is rather apt to grow between artist and sitter, and Editha had told her everything.
“To think of your having such a tragedy in your life!” the lady said. She added: “I suppose there are people who feel that way about war. But when you consider the good this war has done — how much it has done for the country! I can’t understand such people, for my part. And when you had come all the way out there to console her — got up out of a sick-bed! Well!”
“I think,” Editha said, magnanimously, “she wasn’t quite in her right mind; and so did papa.”
“Yes,” the lady said, looking at Editha’s lips in nature and then at her lips in art, and giving an empirical touch to them in the picture. “But how dreadful of her! How perfectly — excuse me — how vulgar!”
A light broke upon Editha in the darkness which she felt had been without a gleam of brightness for weeks and months. The mystery that had bewildered her was solved by the word; and from that moment she rose from grovelling in shame and self-pity, and began to live again in the ideal.
VI
Braybridge’s Offer
We had ordered our dinners and were sitting in the Turkish room at the club, waiting to be called, each in his turn, to the dining-room. It was always a cosey place, whether you found yourself in it with cigars and coffee after dinner, or with whatever liquid or solid appetizer you preferred in the half-hour or more that must pass before dinner after you had made out your menu. It intimated an exclusive possession in the three or four who happened first to find themselves together in it, and it invited the philosophic mind to contemplation more than any other spot in the club.
Our rather limited little down-town dining-club was almost a celibate community at most times. A few husbands and fathers joined us at lunch; but at dinner we were nearly always a company of bachelors, dropping in an hour or so before we wished to dine, and ordering from a bill of fare what we liked. Some dozed away in the intervening time; some read the evening papers or played chess; I preferred the chance society of the Turkish room. I could be pretty sure of finding Wanhope there in these sympathetic moments, and where Wanhope was there would probably be Rulledge, passively willing to listen and agree, and Minver ready to interrupt and dispute. I myself liked to look in and linger for either the reasoning or the bickering, as it happened, and now, seeing the three there together, I took a provisional seat behind the painter, who made no sign of knowing I was present. Rulledge was eating a caviar sandwich, which he had brought from the afternoon tea-table near by, and he greedily incited Wanhope to go on, in the polite pause which the psychologist had let follow on my appearance, with what he was saying. I was not surprised to find that his talk related to a fact just then intensely interesting to the few, rapidly becoming the many, who were privy to it; though Wanhope had the air of stooping to it from a higher range of thinking.
“I shouldn’t have supposed, somehow,” he said, with a knot of deprecation between his fine eyes, “that he would have had the pluck.”
“Perhaps he hadn’t,” Minver suggested.
Wanhope waited for a thoughtful moment of censure eventuating in toleration. “You mean that she—”
“I don’t see why you say that, Minver,” Rulledge interposed, chivalrously, with his mouth full of sandwich.
“I didn’t say it,” Minver contradicted.
“You implied it; and I don’t think it’s fair. It’s easy enough to build up a report of that kind on the half-knowledge of rumor which is all that any outsider can have in the case.”
“So far,” Minver said, with unbroken tranquillity, “as any such edifice has been erected, you are the architect, Rulledge. I shouldn’t think you would like to go round insinuating that sort of thing. Here is Acton,” and he now acknowledged my presence with a backward twist of his head, “on the alert for material already. You ought to b
e more careful where Acton is, Rulledge.”
“It would be great copy if it were true,” I owned.
Wanhope regarded us all three, in this play of our qualities, with the scientific impartiality of a bacteriologist in the study of a culture offering some peculiar incidents. He took up a point as remote as might be from the personal appeal. “It is curious how little we know of such matters, after all the love-making and marrying in life and all the inquiry of the poets and novelists.” He addressed himself in this turn of his thought, half playful, half earnest, to me, as if I united with the functions of both a responsibility for their shortcomings.
“Yes,” Minver said, facing about towards me. “How do you excuse yourself for your ignorance in matters where you’re always professionally making such a bluff of knowledge? After all the marriages you have brought about in literature, can you say positively and specifically how they are brought about in life?”
“No, I can’t,” I admitted. “I might say that a writer of fiction is a good deal like a minister who continually marries people without knowing why.”
“No, you couldn’t, my dear fellow,” the painter retorted. “It’s part of your swindle to assume that you do know why. You ought to find out.”
Wanhope interposed concretely, or as concretely as he could: “The important thing would always be to find which of the lovers the confession, tacit or explicit, began with.”
“Acton ought to go round and collect human documents bearing on the question. He ought to have got together thousands of specimens from nature. He ought to have gone to all the married couples he knew, and asked them just how their passion was confessed; he ought to have sent out printed circulars, with tabulated questions. Why don’t you do it, Acton?”
I returned, as seriously as could have been expected:
“Perhaps it would be thought rather intimate. People don’t like to talk of such things.”
“They’re ashamed,” Minver declared. “The lovers don’t either of them, in a given case, like to let others know how much the woman had to do with making the offer, and how little the man.”
Minver’s point provoked both Wanhope and myself to begin a remark at the same time. We begged each other’s pardon, and Wanhope insisted that I should go on.
“Oh, merely this,” I said. “I don’t think they’re so much ashamed as that they have forgotten the different stages. You were going to say — ?”
“Very much what you said. It’s astonishing how people forget the vital things and remember trifles. Or perhaps as we advance from stage to stage what once seemed the vital things turn to trifles. Nothing can be more vital in the history of a man and a woman than how they became husband and wife, and yet not merely the details, but the main fact, would seem to escape record if not recollection. The next generations knows nothing of it.”
“That appears to let Acton out,” Minver said. “But how do you know what you were saying, Wanhope?”
“I’ve ventured to make some inquiries in that region at one time. Not directly, of course. At second and third hand. It isn’t inconceivable, if we conceive of a life after this, that a man should forget, in its more important interests and occupations, just how he quitted this world, or at least the particulars of the article of death. Of course, we must suppose a good portion of eternity to have elapsed.” Wanhope continued, dreamily, with a deep breath almost equivalent to something so unscientific as a sigh: “Women are charming, and in nothing more than the perpetual challenge they form for us. They are born defying us to match ourselves with them.”
“Do you mean that Miss Hazelwood—” Rulledge began, but Minver’s laugh arrested him.
“Nothing so concrete, I’m afraid,” Wanhope gently returned. “I mean, to match them in graciousness, in loveliness, in all the agile contests of spirit and plays of fancy. It’s pathetic to see them caught up into something more serious in that other game, which they are so good at.”
“They seem rather to like it, though, some of them, if you mean the game of love,” Minver said. “Especially when they’re not in earnest about it.”
“Oh, there are plenty of spoiled women,” Wanhope admitted. “But I don’t mean flirting. I suppose that the average unspoiled woman is rather frightened than otherwise when she knows that a man is in love with her.”
“Do you suppose she always knows it first?” Rulledge asked.
“You may be sure,” Minver answered for Wanhope, “that if she didn’t know it, he never would.” Then Wanhope answered for himself:
“I think that generally she sees it coming. In that sort of wireless telegraphy, that reaching out of two natures through space towards each other, her more sensitive apparatus probably feels the appeal of his before he is conscious of having made any appeal.”
“And her first impulse is to escape the appeal?” I suggested.
“Yes,” Wanhope admitted, after a thoughtful reluctance.
“Even when she is half aware of having invited it?”
“If she is not spoiled she is never aware of having invited it. Take the case in point; we won’t mention any names. She is sailing through time, through youthful space, with her electrical lures, the natural equipment of every charming woman, all out, and suddenly, somewhere from the unknown, she feels the shock of a response in the gulfs of air where there had been no life before. But she can’t be said to have knowingly searched the void for any presence.”
“Oh, I’m not sure about that, Professor,” Minver put in. “Go a little slower, if you expect me to follow you.”
“It’s all a mystery, the most beautiful mystery of life,” Wanhope resumed. “I don’t believe I could make out the case as I feel it to be.”
“Braybridge’s part of the case is rather plain, isn’t it?” I invited him.
“I’m not sure of that. No man’s part of any case is plain, if you look at it carefully. The most that you can say of Braybridge is that he is rather a simple nature. But nothing,” the psychologist added, with one of his deep breaths, “is so complex as a simple nature.”
“Well,” Minver contended, “Braybridge is plain, if his case isn’t.”
“Plain? Is he plain?” Wanhope asked, as if asking himself.
“My dear fellow, you agnostics doubt everything!”
“I should have said picturesque. Picturesque, with the sort of unbeautifulness that takes the fancy of women more than Greek proportion. I think it would require a girl peculiarly feminine to feel the attraction of such a man — the fascination of his being grizzled and slovenly and rugged. She would have to be rather a wild, shy girl to do that, and it would have to be through her fear of him that she would divine his fear of her. But what I have heard is that they met under rather exceptional circumstances. It was at a house in the Adirondacks, where Braybridge was, somewhat in the quality of a bull in a china-shop. He was lugged in by the host, as an old friend, and was suffered by the hostess as a friend quite too old for her. At any rate, as I heard (and I don’t vouch for the facts, all of them), Braybridge found himself at odds with the gay young people who made up the hostess’s end of the party, and was watching for a chance to—”
Wanhope cast about for the word, and Minver supplied it— “Pull out.”
“Yes. But when he had found it Miss Hazelwood took it from him.”
“I don’t understand,” Rulledge said.
“When he came in to breakfast, the third morning, prepared with an excuse for cutting his week down to the dimensions it had reached, he saw her sitting alone at the table. She had risen early as a consequence of having arrived late the night before; and when Braybridge found himself in for it, he forgot that he meant to go away, and said good-morning, as if they knew each other. Their hostess found them talking over the length of the table in a sort of mutual fright, and introduced them. But it’s rather difficult reporting a lady verbatim at second hand. I really had the facts from Welkin, who had them from his wife. The sum of her impressions was that Braybridge and Miss
Hazelwood were getting a kind of comfort out of their mutual terror because one was as badly frightened as the other. It was a novel experience for both. Ever seen her?”
We looked at one another. Minver said: “I never wanted to paint any one so much. It was at the spring show of the American Artists. There was a jam of people; but this girl — I’ve understood it was she — looked as much alone as if there were nobody else there. She might have been a startled doe in the North Woods suddenly coming out on a twenty-thousand-dollar camp, with a lot of twenty-million-dollar people on the veranda.”
“And you wanted to do her as The Startled Doe,” I said. “Good selling name.”
“Don’t reduce it to the vulgarity of fiction. I admit it would be a selling name.”
“Go on, Wanhope,” Rulledge puffed impatiently. “Though I don’t see how there could be another soul in the universe as constitutionally scared of men as Braybridge is of women.”
“In the universe nothing is wasted, I suppose. Everything has its complement, its response. For every bashful man, there must be a bashful woman,” Wanhope returned.
“Or a bold one,” Minver suggested.
“No; the response must be in kind to be truly complemental. Through the sense of their reciprocal timidity they divine that they needn’t be afraid.”
“Oh! That’s the way you get out of it!”
“Well?” Rulledge urged.
“I’m afraid,” Wanhope modestly confessed, “that from this point I shall have to be largely conjectural. Welkin wasn’t able to be very definite, except as to moments, and he had his data almost altogether from his wife. Braybridge had told him overnight that he thought of going, and he had said he mustn’t think of it; but he supposed Braybridge had spoken of it to Mrs. Welkin, and he began by saying to his wife that he hoped she had refused to hear of Braybridge’s going. She said she hadn’t heard of it, but now she would refuse without hearing, and she didn’t give Braybridge any chance to protest. If people went in the middle of their week, what would become of other people? She was not going to have the equilibrium of her party disturbed, and that was all about it. Welkin thought it was odd that Braybridge didn’t insist; and he made a long story of it. But the grain of wheat in his bushel of chaff was that Miss Hazelwood seemed to be fascinated by Braybridge from the first. When Mrs. Welkin scared him into saying that he would stay his week out, the business practically was done. They went picnicking that day in each other’s charge; and after Braybridge left he wrote back to her, as Mrs. Welkin knew from the letters that passed through her hands, and — Well, their engagement has come out, and—” Wanhope paused, with an air that was at first indefinite, and then definitive.
Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells Page 840