Chapter 5

“I shall never repent,” Mrs. March retorted hardily. “It was the right thing, the only thing. We couldn’t have let that poor creature stay on, when she was so anxious to get back to her husband.”

“No.”

“And I confess, Basil, that I feel a little pity for that poor girl, too. It would have been cruel, it would have been fairly wicked, to let her go home so soon, and especially now.”

“Oh! And I suppose that by _especially now_, you mean Kendricks,” I said, and I laughed mockingly, as the novelists say. “How sick I am of this stale old love-business between young people! We ought to know better—we’re old enough; at least _you_ are.”

She seemed not to feel the gibe. “Why, Basil,” she asked dreamily, “haven’t you any romance left in you?”

“Romance? Bah! It’s the most ridiculous unreality in the world. If you had so much sympathy for that stupid girl, in that poor woman in her anxiety about her disappointment, why hadn’t you a little for her sick husband? But a husband is nothing—when you have got him.”

“I did sympathise with her.”

“You didn’t say so.”

“Well, she is only his second wife, and I don’t suppose it’s anything serious. Didn’t I really say anything to her?”

“Not a word. It is curious,” I went on, “how we let this idiotic love-passion absorb us to the very last. It is wholly unimportant who marries who, or whether anybody marries at all. And yet we no sooner have the making of a love-affair within reach than we revert to the folly of our own youth, and abandon ourselves to it as if it were one of the great interests of life.”

“Who is talking about love? It isn’t a question of that. It’s a question of making a girl have a pleasant time for a few days; and what is the harm of it? Girls have a dull enough time at the very best. My heart aches for them, and I shall never let a chance slip to help them, I don’t care what you say.”

“Now, Isabel,” I returned, “don’t you be a humbug. This is a perfectly plain case, and you are going in for a very risky affair with your eyes open. You shall not pretend you’re not.”

“Very well, then, if I am going into it with my eyes open, I shall look out that nothing happens.”

“And you think prevision will avail! I wish,” I said, “that instead of coming home that night and telling you about this girl, I had confined my sentimentalising to that young French-Canadian mother, and her dirty little boy who ate the pea-nut shells. I’ve no doubt it was really a more tragical case. They looked dreadfully poor and squalid. Why couldn’t I have amused my idle fancy with their fortunes—the sort of husband and father they had, their shabby home, the struggle of their life? That is the appeal that a genuine person listens to. Nothing does more to stamp me a _poseur_ than the fact that I preferred to bemoan myself for a sulky girl who seemed not to be having a good time.”

There was truth in my joking, but the truth did not save me; it lost me rather. “Yes,” said my wife; “it was your fault. I should never have seen anything in her if it had not been for you. It was your coming back and working me up about her that began the whole thing, and now if anything goes wrong you will have yourself to thank for it.”

She seized the opportunity of my having jestingly taken up this load to buckle it on me tight and fast, clasping it here, tying it there, and giving a final pull to the knots that left me scarcely the power to draw my breath, much less the breath to protest. I was forced to hear her say again that all her concern from the beginning was for Mrs. Deering, and that now, if she had offered to do something for Miss Gage, it was not because she cared anything for her, but because she cared everything for Mrs. Deering, who could never lift up her head again at De Witt Point if she went back so completely defeated in all the purposes she had in asking Miss Gage to come with her to Saratoga.

I did not observe that this wave of compassion carried Mrs. March so far as to leave her stranded with Mrs. Deering that evening when we called with Kendricks, and asked her and Miss Gage to go with us to the Congress Park concert. Mrs. Deering said that she had to pack, that she did not feel just exactly like going; and my tender heart ached with a knowledge of her distress. Miss Gage made a faint, false pretence of refusing to come with us, too; but Mrs. Deering urged her to go, and put on the new dress, which had just come home, so that Mrs. March could see it. The girl came back looking radiant, divine, and—“Will it do?” she palpitated under my wife’s critical glance.

“Do? It will _out_do! I never saw anything like it!” The connoisseur patted it a little this way and a little that. “It is a dream! Did the hat come too?”

It appeared that the hat had come too. Miss Gage rematerialised with it on, after a moment’s evanescence, and looked at my wife with the expression of being something impersonal with a hat on.

“Simply, there is nothing to say!” cried Mrs. March. The girl put up her hands to it. “Good gracious! You mustn’t take it off! Your costume is perfect for the concert.”

“Is it, really?” asked the girl joyfully; and she seemed to find this the first fitting moment to say, for sole recognition of our self-sacrifice, “I’m much obliged to you, Mr. March, for getting me that room.”

I begged her not to speak of it, and turned an ironical eye upon my wife; but she was lost in admiration of the hat.

“Yes,” she sighed; “it’s much better than the one I wanted you to get at first.” And she afterward explained that the girl seemed to have a perfect instinct for what went with her style.

Kendricks kept himself discreetly in the background, and, with his unfailing right feeling, was talking to Mrs. Deering, in spite of her not paying much attention to him. I must own that I too was absorbed in the spectacle of Miss Gage.

She went off with us, and did not say another word to Mrs. Deering about helping her to pack. Perhaps this was best, though it seemed heartless; it may not have been so heartless as it seemed. I dare say it would have been more suffering to the woman if the girl had missed this chance.

X

WE had undertaken rather a queer affair but it was not so queer after all, when Miss Gage was fairly settled with us. There were other young girls in that pleasant house who had only one another’s protection and the general safety of the social atmosphere. We could not conceal from ourselves, of course, that we had done a rather romantic thing, and, in the light of Europe, which we had more or less upon our actions, rather an absurd thing; but it was a comfort to find that Miss Gage thought it neither romantic nor absurd. She took the affair with an apparent ignorance of anything unusual in it—with so much ignorance, indeed, that Mrs. March had her occasional question whether she was duly impressed with what was being done for her. Whether this was so or not, it is certain that she was as docile and as biddable as need be. She did not always ask what she should do; that would not have been in the tradition of village independence; but she always did what she was told, and did not vary from her instructions a hair’s-breadth. I do not suppose she always knew why she might do this and might not do that; and I do not suppose that young girls often understand the reasons of the proprieties. They are told that they must, and that they must not, and this in an astonishing degree suffices them if they are nice girls.

Of course there was pretty constant question of Kendricks in the management of Miss Gage’s amusement, for that was really what our enterprise resolved itself into. He showed from the first the sweetest disposition to forward all our plans in regard to her, and, in fact, he even anticipated our wishes. I do not mean to give the notion that he behaved from an interested motive in going to the station the morning Mrs. Deering left, and getting her ticket for her, and checking her baggage, and posting her in the changes she would have to make. This was something I ought to have thought of myself, but I did not think of it, and I am willing that he should have all the credit.

I know that he did it out of the lovely generosity of nature which always took me in him. Miss Gage was there with her, and she remained to be consoled after Mrs. Deering departed. They came straight to us from the train, and then, when he had consigned Miss Gage to Mrs. March’s care, he offered to go and see that her things were transferred from her hotel to ours; they were all ready, she said, and the bill was paid.

He did not come back that day, and, in fact, he delicately waited for some sign from us that his help was wanted. But when he did come he had formulated Saratoga very completely, and had a better conception of doing it than I had, after my repeated sojourns.

We went very early in our explorations to the House of Pansa, which you find in very much better repair at Saratoga than you do at Pompeii, and we contrived to pass a whole afternoon there. My wife and I had been there before more than once; but it always pleasantly recalled our wander-years, when we first met in Europe, and we suffered round after those young things with a patience which I hope will not be forgotten at the day of judgment. When we came to a seat we sat down, and let them go off by themselves; but my recollection is that there is not much furniture in the House of Pansa that you can sit down on, and for the most part we all kept together.

Kendricks and I thought alike about the Pompeian house as a model of something that might be done in the way of a seaside cottage in our own country, and we talked up a little paper that might be done for _Every Other Week_, with pretty architectural drawings, giving an account of our imaginary realisation of the notion.

“Have somebody,” he said, “visit people who had been boring him to come down, or up, or out, and see them, and find them in a Pompeian house, with the sea in front and a blue-green grove of low pines behind. Might have a thread of story, but mostly talk about how they came to do it, and how delightfully livable they found it. You could work it up with some architect, who would help you to ‘keep off the grass’ in the way of technical blunders. With all this tendency to the classic in public architecture, I don’t see why the Pompeian villa shouldn’t be the next word for summer cottages.”

“Well, we’ll see what Fulkerson says. He may see an ad. in it. Would you like to do it?”

“Why not do it yourself? Nobody else could do it so well.”

“Thanks for the taffy; but the idea was yours.”

“I’ll do it,” said Kendricks after a moment, “if you won’t.”

“We’ll see.”

Miss Gage stared, and Mrs. March said—

“I didn’t suppose the House of Pansa would lead to shop with you two.”

“You never can tell which way copy lies,” I returned; and I asked the girl, “What should _you_ think, Miss Gage, of a little paper with a thread of story, but mostly talk, on a supposititious Pompeian cottage?”

“I don’t believe I understand,” said she, far too remote from our literary interests, as I saw, to be ashamed of her ignorance.

“There!” I said to Kendricks. “Do you think the general public would?”

“Miss Gage isn’t the general public,” said my wife, who had followed the course of my thought; her tone implied that Miss Gage was wiser and better.

“Would you allow yourself to be drawn,” I asked, “dreamily issuing from an aisle of the pine grove as the tutelary goddess of a Pompeian cottage?”

The girl cast a bewildered glance at my wife, who said, “You needn’t pay any attention to him, Miss Gage. He has an idea that he is making a joke.”

We felt that we had done enough for one afternoon, when we had done the House of Pansa, and I proposed that we should go and sit down in Congress Park and listen to the Troy band. I was not without the hope that it would play “Washington Post.”

My wife contrived that we should fall in behind the young people as we went, and she asked, “What _do_ you suppose she made of it all?”

“Probably she thought it was the house of Sancho Panza.”

“No; she hasn’t read enough to be so ignorant even as that. It’s astonishing how much she doesn’t know. What can her home life have been like?”

“Philistine to the last degree. We people who are near to literature have no conception how far from it most people are. The immense majority of ‘homes,’ as the newspapers call them, have no books in them except the Bible and a semi-religious volume or two—things you never see out of such ‘homes’—and the State business directory. I was astonished when it came out that she knew about _Every Other Week_. It must have been by accident. The sordidness of her home life must be something unimaginable. The daughter of a village capitalist, who’s put together his money dollar by dollar, as they do in such places, from the necessities and follies of his neighbours, and has half the farmers of the region by the throat through his mortgages—I don’t think that she’s ‘one to be desired’ any more than ‘the daughter of a hundred earls,’ if so much.”

“She doesn’t seem sordid herself.”

“Oh, the taint doesn’t show itself at once—

‘If nature put not forth her power About the opening of the flower, Who is it that would live an hour?’

and she _is_ a flower, beautiful, exquisite.”

“Yes, and she had a mother as well as this father of hers. Why shouldn’t she be like her mother?”

I laughed. “That is true! I wonder why we always leave the mother out of the count when we sum up the hereditary tendencies? I suppose the mother is as much a parent as the father.”

“Quite. And there is no reason why this girl shouldn’t have her mother’s nature.”

“We don’t actually _know_ anything against her father’s nature yet,” I suggested; “but if her mother lived a starved and stunted life with him, it may account for that effect of disappointed greed which I fancied in her when I first saw her.”

“I don’t call it greed in a young girl to want to see something of the world.”

“What do you call it?”

Kendricks and the girl were stopping at the gate of the pavilion, and looking round at us. “Ah, he’s got enough for one day! He’s going to leave her to us now.”

When we came up he said, “I’m going to run off a moment; I’m going up to the book-store there,” and he pointed toward one that had spread across the sidewalk just below the Congress Hall verandah, with banks and shelves of novels, and a cry of bargains in them on signs sticking up from their rows. “I want to see if they have the _Last Days of Pompeii_.”

“We will find the ladies inside the park,” I said. “I will go with you—”

“Mr. March wants to see if they have the last number of _Every Other Week_,” my wife mocked after us. This was, indeed, commonly a foible of mine. I had newly become one of the owners of the periodical as well as the editor, and I was all the time looking out for it at the news-stands and book-stores, and judging their enterprise by its presence or absence. But this time I had another motive, though I did not allege it.

“I suppose it’s for Miss Gage?” I ventured to say, by way of prefacing what I wished to say. “Kendricks, I’m afraid we’re abusing your good nature. I know you’re up here to look about, and you’re letting us use all your time. You mustn’t do it. Women have no conscience about these things, and you can’t expect a woman who has a young lady on her hands to spare you. I give you the hint. Don’t count upon Mrs. March in this matter.”

“Oh, I think you are very good to allow me to bother round,” said the young fellow, with that indefatigable politeness of his. He added vaguely, “It’s very interesting.”

“Seeing it through such a fresh mind?” I suggested. “Well, I’ll own that I don’t think you could have found a much fresher one. Has she read the _Last Days of Pompeii_?”

“She thought she had at first, but it was the _Fall of Granada_.”

“How delightful! Don’t you wish we could read books with that utterly unliterary sense of them?”

“Don’t you think women generally do?” he asked evasively.

“I daresay they do at De Witt Point.”

He did not answer; I saw that he was not willing to talk the young lady over, and I could not help praising his taste to myself at the cost of my own. His delicacy forbade him the indulgence which my own protested against in vain. He showed his taste again in buying a cheap copy of the book, which he meant to give her, and of course he had to be all the more attentive to her because of my deprecating his self-devotion.

XI

IN the intimacy that grew up between my wife and Miss Gage I found myself less and less included. It seemed to me at times that I might have gone away from Saratoga and not been seriously missed by any one, but perhaps this was not taking sufficient account of my value as a spectator, by whom Mrs. March could verify her own impressions.

The girl had never known a mother’s care, and it was affecting to see how willing she was to be mothered by the chance kindness of a stranger. She probably felt more and more her ignorance of the world as it unfolded itself to her in terms so altogether strange to the life of De Witt Point. I was not sure that she would have been so grateful for the efforts made for her enjoyment if they had failed, but as the case stood she was certainly grateful; my wife said that, and I saw it. She seemed to have written home about us to her father, for she read my wife part of a letter from him conveying his “respects,” and asking her to thank us for him. She came to me with the cheque it enclosed, and asked me to get it cashed for her; it was for a handsome amount. But she continued to go about at our cost, quite unconsciously, till one day she happened to witness a contest of civility between Kendricks and myself as to which should pay the carriage we were dismissing. That night she came to Mrs. March, and, with many blushes, asked to be allowed to pay for the past and future her full share of the expense of our joint pleasures. She said that she had never thought of it before, and she felt so much ashamed. She could not be consoled till she was promised that she should be indulged for the future, and that I should be obliged to average the outlay already made and let her pay a fourth. When she had gained her point, Mrs. March said that she seemed a little scared, and said, “I haven’t offended you, Mrs. March, have I? Because if it isn’t right for me to pay—”

“It’s quite right, my dear,” said my wife, “and it’s very nice of you to think of it.”

“You know,” the girl explained, “I’ve never been out a great deal at home even; and it’s always the custom there for the gentlemen to pay for a ride—or dance—or anything; but this is different.”

Mrs. March said “Yes,” and, in the interest of civilisation, she did a little missionary work. She told her that in Boston the young ladies paid for their tickets to the Harvard assemblies, and preferred to do it, because it left them without even a tacit obligation.

Miss Gage said she had never heard of such a thing before, but she could see how much better it was.

I do not think she got on with the Last Days of Pompeii very rapidly; its immediate interest was superseded by other things. But she always had the book about with her, and I fancied that she tried to read it in those moments of relaxation from our pleasuring when she might better have been day-dreaming, though I dare say she did enough of that too.

What amused me in the affair was the celerity with which it took itself out of our hands. In an incredibly short time we had no longer the trouble of thinking what we should do for Miss Gage; that was provided for by the forethought of Kendricks, and our concern was how each could make the other go with the young people on their excursions and expeditions. We had seen and done all the things that they were doing, and it presently bored us to chaperon them. After a good deal of talking we arrived at a rough division of duty, and I went with them walking and eating and drinking, and for anything involving late hours, and Mrs. March presided at such things as carriage exercise, concerts, and shopping.

There are not many public entertainments at Saratoga, except such as the hotels supply; but a series of Salvation Army meetings did duty as amusements, and there was one theatrical performance—a performance of _East Lynne_ entirely by people of colour. The sentiments and incidents of the heart-breaking melodrama, as the coloured mind interpreted them, were of very curious effect. It was as if the version were dyed with the same pigment that darkened the players’ skins: it all came out negro. Yet they had tried to make it white; I could perceive how they aimed not at the imitation of our nature, but at the imitation of our convention; it was like the play of children in that. I should have said that nothing could be more false than the motives and emotions of the drama as the author imagined them, but I had to own that their rendition by these sincere souls was yet more artificial. There was nothing traditional, nothing archaic, nothing autochthonic in their poor art. If the scene could at any moment have resolved myself into a walk-round, with an interspersion of spirituals, it would have had the charm of these; it would have consoled and edified; but as it was I have seldom been so bored. I began to make some sad reflections, as that our American society, in its endeavour for the effect of European society, was of no truer ideal than these coloured comedians, and I accused myself of a final absurdity in having come there with these young people, who, according to our good native usage, could have come perfectly well without me. At the end of the first act I broke into their talk with my conclusion that we must not count the histrionic talent among the gifts of the African race just yet. We could concede them music, I supposed, and there seemed to be hope for them, from what they had some of them done, in the region of the plastic arts; but apparently the stage was not for them, and this was all the stranger because they were so imitative. Perhaps, I said, it was an excess of self-consciousness which prevented their giving themselves wholly to the art, and I began to speak of the subjective and the objective, of the real and the ideal; and whether it was that I became unintelligible as I became metaphysical, I found Kendricks obviously not following me in the incoherent replies he gave. Miss Gage had honestly made no attempt to follow me. He asked, Why, didn’t I think it was pretty well done? They had enjoyed it very much, he said. I could only stare in answer, and wonder what had become of the man’s tastes or his principles; he was either humbugging himself or he was humbugging me. After that I left them alone, and suffered through the rest of the play with what relief I could get from laughing when the pathetic emotions of the drama became too poignant. I decided that Kendricks was absorbed in the study of his companion’s mind, which must be open to his contemporaneous eye as it could never have been to my old-sighted glasses, and I envied him the knowledge he was gaining of that type of American girl. It suddenly came to me that he must be finding his account in this, and I felt a little less regret for the waste of civilities, of attentions, which sometimes seemed to me beyond her appreciation.