Chapter 8

"I don't call that bad news, do you, mother? He does need an education, but he will never get it out of books."

"Well, it's a pretty severe sort of education for his parents--nineteen, an only son, and to go without seeing them again. He might at least have come home and enlisted from his own State."

They were at the far end of the platform, facing the dark of the pine-clad ravines. Deep, odorous breaths of night wind came sighing up the slopes.

"Mother, there was something happened last winter that I never told you," Elsie began again, with pauses. "It was so silly, and there seemed no need to speak of it. But I can't bear not to speak now. I don't know if it has made any difference--with Billy's plans. It seems disloyal to tell you. But you must forget it: he's forgotten, I am sure. He said--those silly things, you know! I couldn't have told you then; it was too silly. And I said that I didn't think it was for him or for me to talk about such things. It was for men and women, not boys who couldn't even get their lessons."

"Elsie!" Mrs. Valentin gave a little choked laugh. "Did you say that? The poor boy! Why, I thought you were such good friends!"

"He wasn't talking friendship, mother, and I was furious with him for flunking his exams. He passed in only five out of seven. He ought to have done better than that. He's not stupid; it's that fatal popularity. He's captain of this and manager of that, and they give him such a lot of money. And they pet him, too; they make excuses for him all the time. I told him he must _do_ something before he began to have feelings. The only feeling he had any right to have was shame for his miserable record."

"And that was all the encouragement you gave him?"

"If you call that 'encouragement,'" said Elsie.

"You did very well, my dear; but I suppose you know it was the most intimate thing you could have said to him, the greatest compliment you could pay him. If he ever does make any sort of a record, you have given him the right to come back to you with it."

"He will never come back to me without it," said the girl. "But it was nothing--nothing! All idleness and nonsense, and the music after supper that went to his head."

"I hope it was nothing more than"--Mrs. Valentin checked herself. There were things she said to her husband which sometimes threatened to slip out inadvertently when his youthful copy was near. "Well, I see nothing to be ashamed of, on your side. But such things are always a pity. They age a girl in spite of herself. And the boys--they simply forget. The rebuke does them good, but they forget to whom they owe it. It's just one of those things that make my girlie older. But oh, how fast life comes!"

Elsie slipped her hand under her mother's cloak, and Mrs. Valentin pressed her own down hard upon it.

"We must get aboard, dear. But I'm so glad you told me! And I didn't mean quite what I said about Billy's 'going off mad.' He has given all he had to give, poor boy; why he gave it is his own affair."

"I hope--what I told you--has made no difference about his coming home. It's stupid of me to think it. But hard words come back, don't they, mother? Hard words--to an old friend!"

"Billy is all right, dear; and it was so natural you should be tried with him! 'For to be wroth with one we'"--Mrs. Valentin had another of her narrow escapes. "Come, there is the porter waiting for us."

"Mother," said Elsie sternly, "please don't misunderstand. I should never have spoken of this if I had been 'wroth' with him--in that way."

"Of course not, dear; I understand. And it would never do, anyway, for father doesn't like the blood."

"Father doesn't like the--what, mother?"

Elsie asked the question half an hour later, as they sat in an adjoining section, waiting for their berths to be made up.

"What, dear?"

"What did you say father doesn't like--in the Castants?"

"Oh, the blood, the family. This generation is all right--apparently. But blood will tell. You are too young to know all the old histories that fathers and mothers read young people by."

"I think we are what we are," said Elsie; "we are not our great-grandfathers."

"In a measure we are, and it should teach us charity. Not as much can be expected of Billy Castant, coming of the stock he does, as you might expect of that ancestry," and Mrs. Valentin nodded toward the formidable Eastern contingent. (Elsie was consciously hating them already.) "The fountain can rise no higher than its source."

"I thought there was supposed to be a source a little higher than the ground--unless we are no more than earth-born fountains."

"'Out of the mouth of babes,'" said Mrs. Valentin, laughing gently. "I own it, dear. Middle age is suspicious and mean and unspiritual and troubled about many things. A middle-aged mother is like an old hen when hawks are sailing around; she can't see the sky."

"Yes," said Elsie, settling cosily against her mother's shoulder. "I always know when mammy speaks as my official mother, and when she is talking 'straight talk.' I shall be so happy when she believes I am old enough to hear only straight talk."

* * * * *

"I've got a surprise for you, Elsie," said Mrs. Valentin, a day and a night eastward of the Sierras. They were on the Great Plains, at that stage of an overland journey which suggests, in the words of a clever woman, the advisability of "taking a tuck in the continent."

Elsie's eyebrows seemed to portend that surprises are not always pleasant.

"I've been talking with our Eastern lady, and imagine! her daughter is one of Mrs. Barrington's girls too. This will be her second year. So there is"--

"An offset to Gladys," Elsie interrupted.

"So there is a chance for you to know one girl, at least, of the type I've always been holding up to you, always believed in, though the individuals are so rare."

Elsie's sentiments, unexpressed, were that she wished they might be rarer. Not that the flower of Eastern culture was not all her mother protested she was; but there are crises of discouragement on the upward climb of trying to realize a mother's ambitions for one's self, when one is only a girl--the only girl, on whom the family experiments are all to be wreaked. Elsie suffered in silence many a pang that her mother never dreamed of--pangs of effort unavailing and unappreciated. She wished to conform to her mother's exigent standard, but she could not, all at once, and be a girl too--a girl of sixteen, a little off the key physically, not having come to a woman's repose of movement; a little stridulous mentally, but pulsing with life's dumb music of aspiration; as intense as her mother in feeling, without her mother's power to throw off the strain in words.

"Well, mother?" she questioned.

"She is older than you, and she will be at home. The advances, of course, must come from her, but I hope, dear, you will not be--you will try to be responsive?"

"I never know, mother, when I am not responsive. It's like wrinkling my forehead; it does itself."

Mrs. Valentin made a gesture expressive of the futility of argument under certain not unfamiliar conditions.

"'You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink.' I am leading my Pegasus to the fountain of--what was the fountain?"

Elsie laughed. "Your Pegasus is pretty heavy on the wing, mammy. But I will drink. I will gorge myself, truly I will. The money shall not be spent in vain."

"Oh, the money! Who cares about the money?--if only there were more of it."

They stopped over night in Chicago, and Mrs. Valentin bought some shirt-waists; for the heat had "doubled up on them," as a Kansas farmer on the train remarked.

Elsie trailed about the shops with her mother, not greatly interested in shirt-waists or bargains in French underclothing.

The war pressure seemed to close in upon them as they left the mid-West and drew toward the coast once more. The lists from El Caney were throbbing over the wires, and the country, so long immune from peril and suffering, was awakening to the cost of victory. There was a terrible flippancy in the irrepressible spirit of trade which had seized upon the nation's emblems, freshly consecrated in the blood of her sons, and was turning them to commercial account,--advertising, in symbols of death and priceless devotion, that ribbons or soap or candy were for sale. The flag was, so to speak, dirt-cheap. You could wear it in a hatband or a necktie; you could deface it, or tear it in two, in opening an envelope addressed to you by your bootmaker.

Elsie cast hunted eyes on the bulletin boards. She knew by heart that first list after Las Guasimas. One glance had burned it in forever. It had become one of the indelible scars of a lifetime. Yet those were the names of strangers. If a whiff from an avalanche can fell trees a mile away, how if the avalanche strike you?

They returned to their hotel, exhausted, yet excited, by the heat; and Mrs. Valentin admonished herself of what our boys must be suffering in that "unimaginable climate," and she entered into details, forgetting to spare Elsie, till the girl turned a sickly white.

It was then the bishop's card was sent up--their own late bishop, much mourned and deplored because he had been transferred to an Eastern diocese. There could be no one so invariably welcome, who knew so well, without effort, how to touch the right chord, whether in earnest or in jest that sometimes hid a deeper earnest. His manner at first usually hovered between the two, your own mood determining where the emphasis should rest. He had brought with him the evening paper, but he kept it folded in his hand.

"So you are pilgrims to Mecca," he said, looking from mother to daughter with his gentle, musing smile. "But are you not a little early for the Eastern schools?"

"There are the home visits first, and the clothes," said Mrs. Valentin.

"And where do you stop, and for how long?"

"Boston, for one year, Bishop, and then we go abroad for a year, perhaps."

"Bless me! what has Elsie done that she should be banished from home for two years?"

"She takes her mother with her."

"Yes; that is half of the home. Perhaps that's as much as one girl ought to expect."

"The fathers are so busy, Bishop."

"Yes; the fathers do seem to be busy. So Elsie is going East to be finished? And how old is she now? How does she presume to account for the fact that she is taller than her mother and nearly as tall as her bishop?"

Elsie promptly placed herself at the bishop's side and "measured," glancing over her shoulder at him in the glass. He turned and gravely placed his hand upon her head.

"I thought of writing to you at one time," said Mrs. Valentin, "but of course you cannot keep us all on your mind. We are a 'back number.'"

"She thought I would have forgotten who these Valentins were," said the bishop, smiling.

"No; but you cannot keep the thread of all our troubles--the sheep of the old flock and the lambs of the new. I have had a thousand minds lately about Elsie, but this was the original plan, made years ago, when we were young and sure about things. Don't you think young lives need room, Bishop? Oughtn't we to seek to widen their mental horizons?"

"The horizons widen, they widen of themselves, Mrs. Valentin--very suddenly sometimes, and beyond our ken." The bishop's voice had struck a deeper note; he paused and looked at Elsie with eyes so kind and tender that the girl choked and turned away. "This war is rather a widening business, and California is getting her share. Our boys of the First, for instance,--you see I still call them _our_ boys,--what were they doing a year ago, and what are they doing now? I'll be bound half of them a year ago didn't know how 'Philippines' was spelled."

Mrs. Valentin became restless.

"Is that the evening paper?" she asked.

The bishop glanced at the paper. "And who," said he, "is to open the gates of sunrise for our Elsie? With whom do you intend to place her in Boston?"

"Oh, with Mrs. Barrington."

Mrs. Valentin was watching the bishop, whose eyes still rested upon Elsie.

"She is to be one of the chosen five, is she? The five wise virgins--of the East? But they are all Western virgins this year, I believe."

"If you mean that they are all from the Western States, I think you are mistaken, Bishop."

"Am I? Let us see. There is Elsie, and Gladys Castant, perhaps, and the daughters of my friend Mr. Laws of West Dakota"--

"Bishop!"

"Of West Dakota; that makes four. And then the young lady who was on the train with you, Miss Bigelow, from Los Angeles."

"Bishop! I am certain you are mistaken there. If those people are not Eastern, then I'm from West Dakota myself!"

"We are all from West Dakota virtually, so far as Mecca is concerned. But Mrs. Barrington offers her young ladies those exceptional social opportunities which Western girls are supposed to need. If you want Elsie to be with Eastern girls of the East, let her go to a good Boston Latin school. Did you not go to one yourself, Mrs. Valentin?"

Mrs. Valentin laughed. "That was ages ago, and I was at home. I had the environment--an education in itself. Won't you dine with us, Bishop? We shall have dinner in half an hour."

"In half an hour I must be on the limited express. You seem to have made different connections."

"'The error was, we started wrong,'" said Mrs. Valentin lightly. "We took the morning instead of the evening train. But I was convinced we should be left, and I preferred to get left by the wrong train and have the right one to fall back on." She ceased her babble, as vain words die when there is a sense of no one listening.

Elsie stood at the window looking back into the room. She thought, "Mother doesn't know what she is saying. What is she worried about?"

The bishop was writing with a gold pencil on the margin of the newspaper. He folded it with the writing on top.

"If you had consulted me about that child,"--he looked at Elsie,--"I should have said, 'Do not hurry her--do not hurry her. Her education will come as God sends it.' With experience, as with death, it is the prematureness that hurts."

His beautiful voice and perfect accent filled the silence with heart-warmed cadences.

"Well, good-by, Mrs. Valentin. Remember me to that busy husband."

Mrs. Valentin rose; the bishop took her hand. "Elsie will see me to the elevator. This is the evening paper."

He offered it with the writing toward her. Mrs. Valentin read what he had written: "Billy Castant was killed in the charge at San Juan. Every man in that fight deserves the thanks of the nation."

"Come, Elsie, see me to my carriage," the bishop was saying. He placed the girl's hand on his arm and led her out of the room. At the elevator grating they waited a moment; the cold draft up the shaft fanned the hair back from Elsie's forehead as she stood looking down, watching the ascent of the cage.

"It would be a happy thing," said the bishop, "if parents could always go with their children on these long roads of experience; but there are some roads the boys and the girls will have to take alone. We shall all meet at the other end, though--we shall all meet at the end."

Elsie walked up and down the hall awhile, dreading to go back to the room. A band in the street below was playing an old war-song of the sixties, revived this battle summer of '98,--a song that was sung when the cost of that war was beginning to tell, "We shall meet, but we shall miss him." Elsie knew the music; she had not yet learned the words.

Next morning Mr. Valentin received one of his wife's vague but thrifty telegrams, dated at Chicago, on Sunday night, July 3:

"We cannot go through with it. Expect us home Wednesday."

Mrs. Valentin had spent hours, years, in explaining to Elsie's father the many cogent and crying reasons for taking her East to be finished. It needed not quite five minutes to explain why she had brought her back.

Strangely, none of the friends of the family asked for an explanation of this sudden change of plan. But Elsie envies Gladys her black clothes, and the privilege of crying in public when the bands play and the troops go by.

"Such children--such mere children!" Mrs. Valentin sighs.

But she no longer speaks to Elsie about wrinkling her forehead or showing her boot-soles. It is eye to eye and heart to heart, and only straight talk between them now, as between women who know.

THE HARSHAW BRIDE

[Mrs. Tom Daly, of Bisuka in the Northwest, writes to her invalid sister spending the summer on the coast of Southern California.]

I

You know I am always ready to sacrifice truth to politeness, if the truth is of that poor, stingy upstart variety everybody is familiar with and if the occasion warrants the expense. We all know politeness is not cheap, any more than honesty is politic. But surely I mistook my occasion, one day last winter--and now behold the price!

We are to have a bride on our hands, or a bride-elect, for she isn't married yet. The happy man to be is rustling for a home out here in the wilds of Idaho while she is waiting in the old country for success to crown his efforts. How much success in her case is demanded one does not know. She is a little English girl, upper middle class, which Mrs. Percifer assures us is _the_ class to belong to in England at the present day,--from which we infer that it's her class; and the interesting reunion is to take place at our house--the young woman never having seen us in her life before.

She sailed, poor thing, this day week and will be forwarded to us by her confiding friends in New York as soon as she arrives. Meantime she will have heard from us from the Percifers: that is something.

Really they were very nice to us in New York, last winter, the Percifers--though one must not plume one's self too much. It began as a business flirtation down town between the husbands, and then Tom confidingly mentioned that he had a wife at his hotel. We unfortunate women were dragged into it forthwith, and more or less forced to live up to it. I cannot say there was anything riotous in the way she sustained her part. She was so very impersonal in fact, when we said good-by, that my natural tendency to invite people to come and stay with us, on the spur of any moment, was strangled in my throat.

But one must say something by way of retaliation for hospitality one cannot reject. So I put it off on any friends of theirs who might have occasion to command us in the West. We should be so happy, and so forth. And, my dear, she has taken me up on it! She's not impersonal now. She is so glad--for dear Kitty's sake--that we are here, and she is sure we will be very good to her--such a sweet girl, no one could help being--which rather cuts down the margin for our goodness. The poor child--I am quoting Mrs. Percifer--knows absolutely no one in the West but the man she is coming to marry (?)and can have no conception of the journey she has before her. She will be _so_ comforted to find us at the end of it. And if anything unforeseen should occur to delay Mr. Harshaw, the fiancé, and prevent his meeting her train, it will be a vast relief to Kitty's friends to know that the dear brave little girl is in good hands--ours, if you can conceive it!

Please observe the coolness with which she treats his _not_ meeting that train, after the girl has traversed half the globe to compass her share of their meeting.

Well, it's not the American way; but perhaps it will be when bad times have humbled us a little more, and the question is whether we can marry our daughters at all unless we can give them dowries, or professions to support their husbands on, and "feelings" are a luxury only the rich can afford.

I hope "Kitty" won't have any; but still more I hope that her young man will arrive on schedule time, and that they can trot round the corner and be married, with Tom and me for witnesses, as speedily as possible.

* * * * *

I've had such a blow! Tom, with an effort, has succeeded in remembering this Mr. Harshaw who is poor Kitty's fate. He must have been years in this country,--long enough to have citizenized himself and become a member of our first Idaho legislature (I don't believe you even know that we are a State!). Tom was on the supper committee of the ball the city gave them. They were a deplorable set of men; it was easy enough to remember the nice ones. Tom says he is a "chump," if you know what that means. I tell him that every man, married or single, is constitutionally horrid to any other man who has had the luck to be chosen of a charming girl. But I'm afraid Harshaw wasn't one of the nice ones, or I should have remembered him myself; we had them to dinner--all who were at all worth while.

Poor Kitty! There is so little here to come for _but_ the man.

Well, my dear, here's a pretty kettle of fish! Kitty has arrived, and _one_ Mr. Harshaw. Where _the_ Mr. Harshaw is, _quien sabe_! It's awfully late. Poor Kitty has gone to bed, and has cried herself to sleep, I dare say, if sleep she can. I never have heard of a girl being treated so.

Tom and the other Mr. Harshaw are smoking in the dining-room, and Tom is talking endlessly--what about I can't imagine, unless he is giving this young record-breaker his opinion of his extraordinary conduct. But I must begin at the beginning.

Mrs. Percifer wired us from New York the day the bride-elect started, and _she_ was to wire us from Ogden, which she did. I went to the train to meet her, and I told Tom to be on the watch for the bridegroom, who would come in from his ranch on the Snake River, by wagon or on horseback, across country from Ten Mile. To come by rail he'd have had to go round a hundred miles or so, by Mountain Home. An American would have done it, of course, and have come in with her on the train; but the Percifers plainly expected no such wild burst of enthusiasm from him.

The train was late. I walked and walked the platform; some of the people who were waiting went away, but I dared not leave my post. I fell to watching a spurt of dust away off across the river toward the mesa. It rolled up fast, and presently I saw a man on horseback; then I didn't see him; then he had crossed the bridge and was pounding down the track-side toward the depot. He pulled up and spoke to a trainman, and after that he walked his horse as if he was satisfied.

This is Harshaw, I thought, and a very pretty fellow, but not in the least like an Idaho legislator. I can't say that I care for the sort of Englishman who is so prompt to swear allegiance to our flag; they never do unless they want to go in for government land, or politics, or something that has nothing to do with any flag. But this youngster looked ridiculously young. I simply knew he was coming for that girl, and that he had no ulterior motives whatever. He was ashy-white with dust--hair, eyebrows, eyelashes, and his fair little mustache all powdered with it; his corduroys, leggings, and hat all of a color. I saw no baggage, and I wondered what he expected to be married in. He leaned on his horse dizzily a moment when he first got out of the saddle, and the poor beast stretched his fore legs, and rocked with the gusts of his panting, his sides going in and out like a pair of bellows. The young fellow handed him over to a man to take to the stables, and I saw him give him a regular bridegroom's tip. He's all right, I said to myself, and Tom _was_ horrid to call him a "chump." He beat himself off a bit, and went in and talked to the ticket-agent. They looked at their watches.

"I don't think you'll have time to go uptown," said the ticket-man.

Harshaw came out then, and _he_ began to walk the platform, and to stare down the track toward Nampa; so I sat down. Presently he stopped, and raised his hat, and asked if I was Mrs. Daly, a friend of Mrs. Percifer of London and New York.

Not to be boastful, I said that I knew Mrs. Percifer.