Chapter 10

"Well, I feel no yeast stirring in me," she said languidly. "All the morning I have been trying to recapture a certain 'Ode to a Cow' written by a man of action in a country hotel where mother and I were sojourning last summer. I could have echoed it when I first regarded the inhabitants of these islands, and now anybody might say it of me, for I grow more and more cow-like with every passing day. It runs this way:

"'ODE TO A CUD-CHEWING COW

"'Why, Cow, art thou so satisfied, So well content with all things here below, So meek, so lazy, and so awful slow? Dost thou not know that men's affairs are mixed? That grievously the world needs to be fixed? That nothing we can do has any worth? That life is care and trouble and untowardness? Prit, Cow! This is no time for idleness! The cud thou chewest is not what it seems. Get up and moo! Tear round and quit thy dreams!'"

By this time Dorothea was asleep. Her book slid to the floor, I shaded her face with my green umbrella, pulled down her muslin frock over her pretty ankles, and gave myself up to vagrant thoughts of her probable future.

Sunday on shipboard is a good day for reflections and heart-searchings. My own problem, after all, is not so baffling as Dolly's. She is as loyal as a charming and sensible girl can be to a mother like Mrs. Valentine, whose soul, if the truth were told, is about the size of a mustard-seed. A frivolous, useless, bird-minded woman is Dolly's mother; a woman pecking at life as a canary pecks at its cuttlefish, simply to sharpen its bill. How the girl can respect her I cannot imagine! I suppose flesh calls to flesh and she loves her without too much analysis, but they seem to have come to the parting of the ways. It is Dolly's highest self that is in love with Marmaduke Hogg, and I don't believe she will sacrifice it to a maternal whim and call it filial obedience. Perhaps the absence that makes the heart grow fonder is working like a philter in this journey planned by Mrs. Valentine with a far different purpose.

"Let her go with you, Charlotte," she begged me with tears in her eyes. "I must get her away from this attractive but undesirable young man! That absurd uncle who didn't want his name to die out must have been a lunatic or an imbecile. Why shouldn't such a vulgar name become extinct? And to think that my exquisite Dorothea--whose figure and eyelashes have been remarked by royalty--to think that she should be expected to graft herself on to that family tree of all others! To think that she may take that name herself and, for aught we know, add half a dozen more to the list; all boys, probably, who would marry in course of time and produce others, piling Hoggs on Hoggs, as it were! It is like one of those horrible endless chains that are condemned by the government!"

I gave way to peals of laughter at this impassioned speech, evidently annoying Mrs. Valentine, who expected sympathy. I tried to placate her with reference to the poet of the name which had none but delightful associations in Scotland.

"Then if they choose to defy me and marry each other, let them go and live in Scotland!" she snapped.

"Would you have minded Dolly's marrying Lord Bacon?" I asked.

This gave her food for thought.

"No," she said reflectively, "for, of course, he was a lord, which is something."

"But how about the associations?"

"I can't explain, but somehow they are not as repulsive to me," she insisted. "I always think of bacon cooked, not raw, and--the other is alive!"

As for my own difficulty, it is, after all, a conventional one. I cannot bear the idea of marrying my employer; a man known by sight and reputation to everybody in Washington, while I am a relatively unknown person without fortune, kith, or kin. The thought brings to mind sensational headlines in cheap newspapers regarding the wedding of some aged millionaire with his youthful stenographer, and the consequent alarms of his household; or the alliance of some scion of a wealthy house with a trained nurse of obscure lineage and vaulting ambition. I am all alone in the world, and though my father, who died when he was only five and twenty, left me but the barest support, I have gloried in my independence and rejoiced in my modest successes.

My people on both sides were of good stock. Even the Winthrops could climb my family tree and find no bad fruit on it, but the world will say: "What a splendid match for Charlotte Clifford." ... "I wonder how Ellen Winthrop will take it?" ... "I shouldn't have thought Clive Winthrop would marry his secretary, somehow, though there's nothing against her; but he could look higher!"

The world would be quite right. It is a splendid marriage for Charlotte Clifford, and Clive Winthrop could look higher. He is my superior and that is the reason I love him. That he loves me proves that there is something in me that will rise to his level. All the same, I wrote him when I came away that I could never cross the bridge between us (there is a bridge, although he does not see it) until I was no longer his secretary and until I was sure his sister would welcome me into the household that has been so harmonious and delightful to every human being that has ever crossed its threshold. Nobody could equal Ellen Winthrop as a hostess, with her fine, spirited face, lovely even at seventy; her gift of repartee, her stately manner, her simple, trailing dress, always of black or gray, and always reaching the floor, when most of the feminine world looks, in its best clothes, as if mounted on stilts, with a skimpy, semi-detached tail wriggling its silly length behind! I could never scale the heights on which the splendid Ellen perpetually dwells, but I could sit at the foot of them and admire with all my heart, and perhaps that attitude, if fully understood, might win her affection.

* * * * *

S.S. Diana, January 28, 1918

At Antigua we anchored and took a steam launch to see the town, where we visited a very fine sugar-cane factory, watching the whole process from the cane-field to the market.

We did not land at Guadeloupe, the hour not being favorable and the stay being too brief to compensate for the effort involved. But this morning at eight we approached Dominica, the largest of the Leeward group, the loftiest of the Lesser Antilles, and the loveliest--if one could or ought to make comparison--the loveliest of the West Indian Isles. The guidebook calls it "The Caribbean Wonderland," and Dolly and I were not disposed to quarrel with the phrase, after hanging over the deck-rail for an hour before breakfast and marveling at the beauty of the view. Mountains shimmered in the distance like visions seen in dreams, mountains like towering emeralds springing from a sapphire sea! We passed tiny hamlets, half-hidden in lime orchards, and cocoa-groves with yellow patches of cane gleaming here and there against a background of forest. As we drew nearer we could see white torrents dashing tempestuously down through green valleys, for Dominica has a too plenteous water-supply, since in some districts three hundred inches a year is the average rainfall. It rained seven times in the three hours that we passed on shore, but the showers were gentle ones, and we found generous shelter in the wonderful Botanical Garden, where we spent most of our time.

Nature is sometimes a kindly mother; often she wears a tragic mask, and now and then she indulges in melodrama; but I never conceived the possibility of her having a sense of humor until we witnessed her freakish mood in the Dominica garden. There were the usual varieties of magnificent palms and brilliant flowering shrubs; but the joy of joys was the Sausage-Tree, around which we walked in helpless mirth at the incredible veracity of the imitation. It reached a goodly height, and had a splendid girth and circumference of shade; but no factory in Bologna or Frankfort, or any other possible birthplace of the real article, could rival this amazing, this funny, tree in fertility. Its product was just a trifle large, save for the omnivorous lover of sausage; but in other respects it was a faithful copy of the original--unless, indeed, the first sausage-maker borrowed the idea from the tree, instead of the other way about. These vegetable sausages hung in hundreds of strings and festoons and clusters from the topmost to the lowest branches. Because of the way they hung, the way they were strung, their shape and color, and the very manner in which the skin was neatly drawn over each one and fastened, no one possessing a sense of the ridiculous but would sit down under the tree and laugh at the joke. Oddly enough we could find no pictorial postcard of this phenomenon to bring home for the enlivening of winter evenings, though we bought a capital one of the Cannon-Ball Tree, just as unique in its way but not so absurd.

Dorothea was enchanted with Dominica, and kept exclaiming every few minutes: "Oh, if only Great Britain would sell us this island! I think I'd choose to live in Dominica, because if I had a sausage-tree in my garden I should laugh every day, and the children wouldn't need any playthings."

* * * * *

S.S. Diana, February 1, 1918

We have had a glimpse of France through a day at Martinique. The principal feature of our visit was a wild motor-drive up an eighteen-hundred-foot mountain. It was a steady climb from glory to glory, with tropical forests on every side. Our method of progress was not quite serene, for there was not a sufficient number of cars to satisfy the demand.

After a long wait Dolly and I took a small mongrel sort of motor that had been refused by all the Diana's passengers. The Creole driver, handsome, debonair, persuasive, and fluent, though unintelligible, assured us that he had ascended and descended the mountain hundreds of times, a fact only too obvious to one who examined his means of transportation. None of the tires matched, and two of them looked like wounded soldiers just home from the front, displaying patches of adhesive plaster and bandages of cotton and woolen rags of every color, with an occasional inset of an alien material into the rubber. One could catch a glimpse of a tin tomato-can neatly introduced in the place of some vital bit of machinery; a Waterbury alarm-clock figured in an unexpected position, apparently adding its power to the engine; and there were stout ropes, here and there, which I never observed before in the rigging of any motor.

I hesitated to enter, for the future, though not absolutely certain, looked full of hope and promise; but Dolly was firm and reckless. I am ten years her senior, but still young to be called a "'fraid cat" with impunity; so I finally mounted the vehicle. The driver gave a gay, insouciant tap to a front tire, as much as to say: "Courage, mon enfant! C'est la derniere fois!"--then flung himself into his seat, and, blowing a horn, started his base-hospital up the mountain at a breakneck pace. The motor's own horn was out of commission, but there was a substitute by the driver's side. It was easy for him to blow it because he had no particular use for either of his hands, his steering being left largely to chance. Repeated expostulations in boarding-school French only elicited a reply that sounded like: "Soyez tranquilles, mesdames. You speak American? Bien! Leezy est parfaitement docile!"

This conveyed no idea to me, although his broad grin convinced me that in his own opinion it was a subtle witticism. At length, however, it burst upon Dolly, who went off into irrepressible gales of laughter.

"You have lived so continuously in a rarefied Winthrop atmosphere, Charlotte, that you haven't any modern vocabulary. He is telling you the pet name of his car, to give you confidence. Nobody ever dies in a tin 'Lizzie.' Not only is the machine indestructible, but the people that ride in it. Isn't the driver a witty, reckless darling?"

He was, indeed; and, incredible as it may seem, Lizzie ascended and descended the mountain in safety--though only because a kind Providence watched over us. Then, when we had paid the reckless, danger-proof darling twice the sum he should have demanded, we sat on a bench in the Savanna, where we could be quietly grateful that we were alive and watch the coming and going of the Fort-de-France townspeople, so unmistakably French, with the bright costumes of the women, the pose of their turbans or hats, their sparkle and chatter and vivacious gestures.

Here in the Savanna travelers always gather to look at the marble statue of the Empress Josephine, which is called the greatest work of art in the West Indies. That is not fatuous praise, perhaps, but the figure needed the hand of no master sculptor to hold the eye and captivate the imagination. It is mounted on a huge pedestal and is of heroic size, the white glitter of its marble enhanced by its truly magnificent setting, a circle of towering royal palms. There she stands, the lovely Creole woman of Martinique, forever looking at "Trois Islets," as if she were remembering her birth in an overseer's shack and her girlhood passed in a sugar-mill. Straightway the crowds of native men and women chaffering in the market-place, the mothers holding up their crowing babies to the statue, the nursemaids and groups of playing children, all vanished, and we re-lived in spirit poor Josephine's past, thrilling anew at the remembrance of her romance, her triumph, and her bitter sorrow--the Creole girl who crossed the sea to become Empress of France and share a throne with Napoleon, but who sailed back to her island home a brokenhearted woman.

Good-bye, Martinique, land of Josephine; and land of St. Pierre, the scene of one of the greatest tragedies of modern times, when the fury of Mont Pelee engulfed the growth of centuries and buried forty thousand human creatures in its scalding lava. St. Lucia, of the Windward group, to-morrow, and then Barbados, from whence the Diana goes on to Demerara and returns a week or so later, so that we are able to rejoin her, taking up our former comfortable cabins and our much-liked captain.

* * * * *

S.S. Diana Between Barbados and New York February 11

Here we are again on our homeward trip, making fewer landings and briefer stops, principally to take on passengers and thousands of barrels of limes.

Barbados, with its charming hotel at Hastings, was an unalloyed delight; and Dorothea, who had determined to live in each of the islands as it came along, would finally have transferred her allegiance for good and all had it not seemed more loyal for an American to choose one of our own possessions and "grow up with the country." We found ourselves in the midst of pleasant, even distinguished, society--British officials, ex-governors, and judge-advocates of the various islands, English and Canadian soldiers on sick-leave, and officers commanding the U-boat chasers in near-by waters. Dorothea danced nightly and held court daily on the broad piazzas, reminding me of Rudyard Kipling's fascinating heroine in an Indian army post, who, whenever she appeared, caused the horizon to become black with majors. Her head and heart remained true to the absent Marmaduke--I am not so sure about her dancing feet!

Now that that experience is over, with the many others, we are at sea and quiet again, with one tranquil day just like the other.

"What a honeymoon journey it would make, Charlotte!" said Dolly one moonlight evening on deck. "It is so difficult to grow in knowledge of people in New York or Washington. One doesn't even know one's self."

"All journeys must be good for honeymooners, don't you think?"

"Yes, in a way; but some places are created for lovers and newlyweds, who are, after all, only explorers, Charlotte, forever discovering new lands and annexing new territories."

"Yes; and sometimes falling into the hands of savages and cannibals, I suppose."

"Yes; that must be terrible--the awakening to find that one has been mistaken in a man!" sighed Dolly.

"I dare say we ought to worry lest men be mistaken in us; it might happen, you know."

"Your mind is so logical, Charlotte! However, this voyage wouldn't have to be idealized to meet the needs of honeymooners. In a Vermont village where I sometimes stay I remember a girl who had to be married on Sunday because she could not give up her position as telegraph-operator till Saturday night. That was dull enough in all conscience, but she was married in her high-school graduating dress, and went to her grandmother's house, ten miles away, for her wedding-journey. I think it required considerable inward felicity to exalt that situation!"

I sat upright in my steamer chair. "Dorothea," I said sharply, "you have been manufacturing conversation for the last five minutes--just killing time for fear that I should ask you questions. Is there anything on your mind? You have been absentminded and nervous for days."

"Your imagination is working overtime, Charlotte," she answered. "We are nearing home, that is all; and life presses closer."

I could not gainsay her, for every mile of ocean crossed makes my heart beat faster. I seem to be living just now in a sort of pause between my different lives. There is the heaven of my childhood in the vague background; then the building of my "career," if so modest a thing can be called by so shining a name; then the steady, half-conscious growth of a love that illumines my labors, yet makes them difficult and perplexing; and now there is a sense of suspended activity, of waiting, with a glimmering air-castle rising like an iridescent bubble out of the hazy future. Sometimes there are two welcoming faces at a window and sometimes the indistinct figure of a woman stretching out a forbidding hand, my chief's sister, who may not want a third person in the family!

* * * * *

S.S. Diana, February 13, 1918

Dolly went on the bridge this afternoon and stayed a half-hour with the captain, giving no reason save that she liked to talk with him, which seemed plausible, but did not satisfy me. At bedtime I discovered her unpacking and laying out in her upper berth a dazzling toilet for our landing at St. Thomas to-morrow. She blushed when I looked in upon her.

"Do dress 'up to me,' Charlotte," she coaxed. "I don't want to be conspicuous. Wear your gray georgette and the broad hat with the roses."

"Why this sudden display of vanity and good clothes?"

"Hasn't your letter of introduction to Governor Oliver brought us an invitation to luncheon at Government House?"

"Yes; but I don't suppose it is a banquet."

"Charlotte, I must confide in you."

"I should think it was about time."

"What do you mean?"

"I have known for days that you were concealing something."

"I didn't want to be secretive, but I thought it was only fair to you to keep my own counsel. Now you can report to mother that you knew nothing, and that therefore you couldn't interfere."

"But what have you done? You can't be secretly married--with your chosen man in Washington and you on the vasty deep."

"No; but I'm next door to it."

"What do you mean by 'next door'? Have you a groom and a minister waiting on the New York dock?"

"No; mother will be there, but I fear she won't bring a minister. I'm so glad you imagined something far, far worse than I ever intended. It shows that you are more audacious than I--though nobody would believe it."

"I don't like your tone; but go on."

"I've been communicating rather frequently with Duke."

"So I fancied, from your changing money at every stop and doing continual sums on paper."

"It has made me a pauper--this telegraphing in war-time. The messages go by Jamaica or Porto Rico or Trinidad or Bermuda and lots of other islands, and I think some of the messages must be personally conducted straight to New York by powerful swimmers, judging by the cost."

"Go on. Don't temporize."

"I needn't repeat all of them, and in fact I haven't copies. Duke, after he had my first telegram from St. Thomas, wired back to St. Croix, '_You are willing to take my name. Why, after all, shouldn't I refuse your sacrifice and make one of my own by taking yours?_' Wasn't that noble?"

"It would have softened the heart of a suffragette or a feminist. What did you reply?"

"I said: '_Never in the world!_'"

"'Never' would have been enough. You wasted three words at a dollar or so apiece."

"I wanted to be strong. I said: '_Never in the world! I am not going to have you criticized and nagged and made unhappy, as if your name were a crime!_' Then he wired: '_But it would remove objections, and cost only six thousand a year._' I had to wait two whole days and nights before I could cable: '_Objector will surely meet me in New York. She will probably forgive if we are both firm. My mind is made up. I would rather be a you-know-what than remain a Valentine._'"

"That was strong enough."

"I meant it to be. He has been scurrilously treated, and somebody must stand by him. Now, to-morrow, February 14th, is his birthday. I remember it because we met on St. Valentine's day, and it wasn't many hours afterward that I guessed how he felt about me."

"Dorothea! Do you mean to tell me that a man spoke to you of his feelings within twenty-four hours of the time you met?"

"No, I do not."

"You certainly intimated as much. If it wasn't many hours after you met on the 14th it must have been on the 15th."

"No, you are wrong, Charlotte. It was the evening of the same day. We met in the early morning."

"It sounds like a children's party with an exchange of those snapping-mottoes."

"Duke is nearly twenty-eight, you know, Charlotte; so it is simply nonsense to jeer at him. You ought to be able to imagine what sort of things would be said between two persons mutually attracted to each other--when you remember that he was born on February 14th and my name is Valentine. The coincidence simply put ideas into our heads; but I won't go on if you don't sympathize."

"I don't actually disapprove, not at heart. Now, what has his birthday got to do with to-morrow and St. Thomas?"

"Why, I cabled him as soon as we arrived at Barbados: '_What would you like for a birthday present from the West Indies?_' I knew that he would remember we met on St. Valentine's day and an answer could reach me at St. Thomas."

"Couldn't you buy him a souvenir without inquiring at great expense what he'd prefer?"

"Ye-es; but I thought it was a nice, affectionate question."

"Well?"

"Well, he cabled one word, Charlotte."

"I guessed that the moment you quoted your message. When you asked: '_What shall I bring you from the West Indies?_' Duke promptly answered, '_Yourself._'"

"Charlotte, you are positively uncanny! How did you manage to hit upon it?"

"It doesn't take as much intellect as you fancy. You are as transparent as a plate of glass. Well, when he said '_Yourself_,' how did you answer him?"

"It's the only thing I don't like to tell you, but I must. I reflected a full half-hour at Barbados. It was one of those heavenly moonlight nights not suitable for reflection. Then I wrote a message and sent it to the office by one of the colored waiters so that the hotel people shouldn't read it. It said" (and here she turned her face away from me): "'_Deliveries from the West Indies are uncertain and expensive; come and get me._'--Do you think that was forward?"

I laughed irresistibly and a long time. "It certainly was not backward, but it was delicious," I said at length, wiping the tears from my eyes. "However, he seems as impetuous and tempestuous as you, so perhaps it doesn't matter."