Part 7
“Can’t you see,” he pursued, playfully knocking the pipe against the desk as if it were my head, “can’t you see the interest of intermittent associations in which all themes are relatively new and are never quite exhausted? What is it that makes marriage so stupid except to the accidentally right pair?—the certainty that the two who have become one will get talked out. It must be like talking to one’s self. In society it is different. You can’t get talked out. You can hardly get started, and a person must be a tremendous bore to give himself away with so small a chance. Thus you see it is very democratic and levelling. The brilliant don’t have too much swing and the stupid are not crushed. There are men who are immense fun—once; girls who are witty and fascinating—the first time. Others have a long run,—for weeks, months, even years. But you can’t say how long a run they would have if you married them.”
“Tranton,” I said, “that is the way you talk to them. I know you. I simply won’t listen to your make-believe.”
“Oh, I am told that girls change a good deal during their married era,” went on Tranton, blowing the smoke at his bronze mandarin; “that would help keep it from being monotonous. Marriage itself is bound to change us when less revolutionary things are so potent. Take Grimsedge. Before he had his butler he was one man. After he had his butler he was quite another. He recognizes it himself. If he were writing his life I have no doubt but that he would divide the whole scheme into B. B.—Before Butler, and A. B.—After Butler. A woman’s married life, as I have been told repeatedly by women themselves, is full of change. Her constantly fluctuating estimate of her husband is one influence,—perhaps enough to account for everything. A friend of mine on the exchange told me the other night that his wife had gone through so many phases that when he reviewed his domestic career he felt as if he had been married to half a dozen different women. Now a man without a bigamous mind—”
“Tranton,” I interposed, “I have heard women speak of you as a nice man;—what did they mean?”
“Ye gods!” murmured Tranton to the mandarin, “he asks me what a woman _means_!” Then he turned to me. “Let me give you another pipe. I have always been suspicious of that one. Once when I was smoking that pipe I wrote a drivelling letter to a girl in—take this one. It has a longer stem. The heat won’t be so near your brain centre. When you smoke that pipe cogent thoughts will come into your head. It is curious about smoking. You can pull a long stem in one place and you can’t in another. There is a great deal in locality. A very proper woman may smoke in Savannah, but a very proper woman may not smoke in Philadelphia. That is the way it goes.”
“Tranton, suppose I were a woman—”
“I can’t,” retorted Tranton promptly, “I haven’t that kind of an imagination. And it would be wrong in principle.”
“Suppose I were a woman,” I went on, “and had asked you how you justified yourself for being a nice man—”
“A woman wouldn’t ask any such fool thing. And what right have you to the secrets of the confessional? Here I am indicted for being a nice man on hearsay evidence. It isn’t fair.”
“Ah! my dear Tranton, you had better plead guilty and be done with it. We never could find an unbiased jury!”
“What is my sentence? Am I sentenced to be confined in marriage with the girl for the rest of my natural life?”
“It would be a pity, Tranton, for you really are a sort of social father confessor. A great many girls would miss you if you were to marry. They have had you to practise on, to say their nicest things to, and you have never made them worry at the thought that you possibly could mean anything yourself.”
“Go on,” said Tranton staring down into the fuming abyss of his pipe.
“You have been so much nicer than the fellows who were in love, because you are always self-possessed and considerate and cheerful. Above all you have let them—the girls—be self-possessed and considerate and cheerful. They wouldn’t dare be so nice to the fellows they were in love with. Your easiness and effectiveness with them and their responsive easiness and effectiveness with you are a constant incitement to the men who are in the race for fair. You pace the lover.”
“Not so bad,” muttered Tranton to the mandarin.
“You are regarded as extremely useful. You are usher, best man, friend in need. You balance the table with the nice girl who is to be conservatively brought into the game. Single men tell you their hopes, married men their troubles. You can run a german or a chafing-dish. You always let a girl with a bad complexion have her back to the window, and when they ask you to make a light, you don’t set things flaring like a barroom. You flatter them by well-timed antagonisms. You never let it seem that you have permitted them to win, and you never beat them badly. You never flatter in words if there is a way of doing the thing by an action. You please the plain and tease the pretty. You ask nothing and you get everything—everything but the greatest thing of all.”
“You have left out some things,” said Tranton, smiling, “several important things.” He seemed to be going over these in his mind. “It is quite natural. You couldn’t know. We all have to persuade ourselves—unless we are a complaining bore—that life has great compensations for us. We _have_ to stay satisfied. An optimist such as I am is like one of those story-telling liars who repeatedly increase the figures, not merely to assure the astonishment of each new listener, but to keep up their own interest.”
“Are you an optimist?”
“Of course I am. Even on your own showing I have much to be thankful for. I may not have the greatest rewards, but I have many that are sweet if not great. If the best man sometimes sees the other fellow get the best woman, he also sees him take the great risks,—also sees him take the woman who is not best. If the stunning girls marry some one else, they expect a great deal from the some one else, and if they stop being stunning the burden of that is not too keenly on me. The new era finds them immensely discriminating, hard to please. They have a wide choice nowadays, and they exercise that choice with the austerity of a sovereign. Just now they are a little tired of dukes. They like football heroes better. And then there is always the trooper. He is in great demand. Then, too, the girls are getting very tall. It is hard to pair well with them. They are getting dreadfully clever, too, and that must make it intellectually difficult continuously to live up to them. The taste for violent contrasts seems to me degenerate. I hope the fashion will go out. I met Miss Wainscott the other day with little Carew. I tell you, they looked _wrong_. Then there is that little canary bird of a Miss Prune just engaged to big Kane. I joked her about him and she said she could say of him as Don Quixote said of Morgante, that though of gigantic size he was most gentle in his manners. Of course, she will subdue Kane,—I told her she would make sugar Kane of him,—these little women are wonders. But that does not modify the spectacular absurdity of it.”
“It remains for you, Tranton, to set an example in this matter. You are a good example as far as you go. You have not been called a nice man without reason. But you pause before the ultimate example. You beg the question.”
“Probably the trouble is that I have a fatal veneration for women in general. I think of the individual only as epitomizing the sex. I understand that to be a fatal attitude of mind. Yet I find a corresponding attitude in many young women and women who are not young, and you have no idea how interesting that view makes them.”
“Oh, yes I have! That is the trouble. It makes them as interesting as it makes you.”
“Then what are you complaining about?”
“I am wondering what will become of you.”
“Become of me? There you are with your romantic, old-fashioned ideas again. Why should I become? I tell you, life reminds me of one of those boxes built to hold circulars or catalogues or free-distribution periodicals. They are marked on the outside ‘Take one?’ But there is nothing inside. Everything has been taken. We can’t all draw prizes,—we can’t all _be_ prizes. ‘They also serve,’ you know.”
“You will be punished,” I said. “When Age has put you through the inquisition, and you have been broken on the wheel—of Time—you will take it all back, and will incur the aspersion of marrying to have some one who will put out your slippers.”
“You forget, that in that grand climacteric I shall have some very sweet memories.”
“It would be interesting to know what you will think of the American girl—then.”
“I can think only one way of her,” said Tranton firmly, and he put away his pipe as he might have taken off his hat. “She puzzles the foreigner, but she need not puzzle us after all. I was reading the other day a British officer’s estimate of our volunteers in Luzon. ‘They might be described,’ he says, ‘as a great military paradox—a body of men of magnificent physique, possessing perfect discipline, and yet without any discipline at all.’ It occurred to me that much the same thing might be said about the American girl. She doesn’t appear to have much discipline, but she has as much as her brothers, and evidently she has all she needs and the sort she needs.”
“If you had found her undisciplined, Tranton, you would have seen your duty.”
“I have no doubt that she has acquired a certain discipline from me—from her privilege of disciplining me. She will manage her husband better because she has been able to practise on me. She has given us new ideals. ‘She never suggests an inferiority that makes her lovely.’ We can’t imagine her lovely that way. She is never a ‘sad ungathered rose.’ She isn’t gathered. Sometimes I wish she was a shade less practical; but I generally attribute this wish to the wrong pipe or a streak of ugly weather. She only reflects the spirit of the age. The other day, in a moment of curiosity, I ran into one of those highly moral restaurants that have Biblical texts on the walls, and there, under the gorgeously lettered beatitude, ‘Blessed are the pure in heart,’ was the brutal admonition in plain black and white, ‘Keep your eye on your hat.’ Under the sign, ‘Blessed is the matchmaker,’ a man should be able to read, ‘Keep your eye on your head.’ The world knows its business, and I suppose it is a better world than it ever was before. Yet it seems as if it must be getting harder to write poetry about it. What should you say to that?”
“I should say that if the world is better than it was, and that if it really is harder to write poetry about it, so much the worse for poetry. The joke isn’t on the world. I certainly do not think there is less real poetry in the world. Perhaps people live poetry more and write poetry less. Your American girls will have to look into this matter. The other day one of the magazinists discussed ‘The Passing of the Man Poet.’ Suppose this does happen, who is to celebrate the American girl as only verse can celebrate her? Are her praises only to be sung in a frowsy, pipish cave at eleven-thirty by two doting, sentimental men? Here we are sliding into the night of the century. What a collection a century of her gowns and bonnets would make!—those high-waisted, clinging things, and the ‘pokes’ she wore in the morning of the century; the slope-shouldered, balloon-skirted affairs she put on at noon; the heaped enigmas she taunted the world with in the afternoon, and the modern _décolleté_ paradox which little Tony Atwell explained in calling it a ‘coming out’ dress. We have become very plain and unpoetical, Tranton, but they are as picturesque as ever. They symbolize for us the eternal freshness, the unconquerable youth of nature. They preserve and transmit the primitive gayeties of art, the natural impulses of a younger world. The note of our raiment is _blasé_; hers gives token of an unjaded joy in the beautiful.”
“Sentiment,” said Tranton, “is like a cigar. You see only the smoke by daylight, the fire at night.”
“I don’t like that at all, for, by and by the cigar burns out.”
“Then you light another.”
“And if you do that too often you incur the smoker’s heart. Give heed to that, Tranton. Don’t tempt Providence. The day will come when your magic will wane of its power, when your ear will grow dull to the poetry of life, unless—”
“I never wrote poetry but once,” said Tranton, in a voice that scarcely explained whether he was speaking to the mandarin or to me. “Perhaps that was because I never _lived_ poetry but once.” Then he stopped as if he had said more than he should, and reaching for his pipe he began filling it again, deliberately. When he had finished this labor and had the smoke rising again, he reached down and drew out one of the drawers of the desk and lifted a little ebony box. This he placed on the desk, and opened casually with his left hand, pulling hard at the pipe and staring straight before him. From out the velvet recesses of the box came a miniature photograph framed in gold.
“I think I never showed you that,” said Tranton simply.
“You never did,” I answered.
I had seen the face if I had not seen the picture before. The picture called up the breathing loveliness of a young girl with frank American eyes, and lips that always seemed about to ask the question her eyes answered; a girl with wonderful hair, and above all, with a manner which the word “charm” seems but vaguely to suggest. Every one liked Celeste. It was a great shock when suddenly they took her away to Colorado.... I remember the wonderful glow of flowers when they carried her out of the church....
Tranton said not a word. It was plain enough....
We sat there silently for a moment. I held the miniature in my hand.
“Tranton,” I said, not knowing what else to say, “I guess the women understand you pretty well, after all.”
There was a moment of silence.
“I am very easy,” said Tranton, “—to them.”
IX
WITH AN ENGAGED GIRL
_Miss Velrose and Rollington will be engaged within twenty-four hours._
In the sanctuary of love we find many who came to scoff and remain to pray; and Cupid in the sacristy, tugging at his vestments, is guilty of a purely voluntary and perhaps not wholly decorous drooping of one eyelid.
_Miss Velrose and Rollington have come back from the boathouse. They are sitting on the stone bench under that maple._
Ah! Cupid has changed! Now he is reared in a kindergarten and is object-taught rather than book-taught. Arrows have gone out. Anyway, they sometimes were geared with a white feather. Cupid is now using a repeater—and smokeless powder. You can’t locate him.
_It is not so much that there is any difference in Rollington. The difference is in Miss Velrose. I have seen it coming on. They will be engaged to-day._
A man might propose and give no sign. There may be nothing absurd in the supposition that men ceased going on their knees when they abandoned knee-breeches and began wearing trousers, to which such an attitude is assumed to be an injustice. The theory has a chronological plausibility. But doubtless we shall find that there are other, if less pictorial, reasons for the change.
_Hello! they have left the bench under the maple! Where did they go? It is a dangerously fine day. A proposal on such a day shouldn’t be binding._
Probably a general decadence in the habit of bending the knee has something to do with the disappearance of this feature of the proposal. Indeed, it is quite easy to see that the whole language of gesture is undergoing a change. Witness the present simplicity of the hat-removing gesture as compared with the highly circuitous symbolism of the seventeenth century; and there is quite as great a change between the bow of our day and that of the colonial era as between the kowtow of the Japanese, and the elegant salutation of the first Empire. Emerson complained of hand-shaking, though he was never stingy of his own friendly grasp, and the most cordial of modern hand-shakes is a great modification. As Perry says, the girls now give you only one joint. All merely physical expressions of deference are perceptibly dwindling. There is no telling where these changes may stop. Kissing, long condemned both by science and by cynicism, survives variously and without apparent abatement. But we can not doubt that it is doomed. It may be the last of the inter-personal physical salutations to disappear; yet it must go. It is enough that we think, or at most look, our cordiality, and a woman, trained to these subtle readings, could not see a man physically kneel without laughing. In a telepathic millennium, not, perhaps, so far away, men will propose and be accepted without sign or sound, and the thought of photographic, or even of phonographic, record will be a meaningless joke.
_O! there they are, crossing the tennis court in the direction of the arbor near the pine grove._
We learn from chemistry that not merely elements but sequences affect final quality. A sentimental situation may be tritely made up in this way: A woman; a man; a question; an answer. But how variously these may be put together!
_Undoubtedly they are visible through the foliage of the arbor if any one chose to look. Let them alone._
It takes talent to reject a man gracefully; genius gracefully to accept him. Many a woman loses her last chance of supremacy, if she does not imperil her equality, in the manner of her acceptance. I have heard a woman say that she never forgave her husband the artistic order and self-possession of his proposal. The brutality of such a thing lies in the fact that she cannot effectively do the same thing, though he might deserve it. Deny her surprise or confusion or some assumption of unpreparedness and you deny her a sophistry which sentiment seems by no means ready to give up.
_Of course they are still in the arbor. Who builds arbors? What do they build them for? Have those who build them prophetic souls?_
Why, it was Miss Velrose herself who once spoke to me about unfair advantages. I can hear her very words: “And he took her away to sit out a dance,—yes, on a romantic balcony where the moon gave everything a theatrical color; where you could hear only the chirp of the piccolo, and the chuckle of the ’cello, and sang to her the song of songs. It wasn’t fair, of course. No girl could stand that. And a man who could live up to such a proposal would be a miracle.” “Be patient,” I urged, “there are new miracles.” “But they are not called men,” she said.
_I know they are in the arbor, for there is Mrs. Velrose standing squarely in the middle of the coach road staring in that direction._
When I asked Miss Velrose the other day who was in love with her now, she looked at me quizzically and asked: “Do you mean, who is abusing me now?” I presume that is the only abuse Miss Velrose ever has had to suffer,—that of young men who have tried to scold her into being less obdurate. Women are not likely to reward abuse unless it is accompanied by tremendous persistency. In spite of time and change, persistency remains the greatest of all factors in courtship. Courting is like advertising—you must keep it up.
_Mrs. Velrose has taken the butterfly net from the Winkinson midget and is chasing a papilio ajax—in the direction of the arbor. Mrs. Velrose is late._
It has been droll to see Mrs. Velrose guarding, with maternal persistency, her tall, white, sparkling daughter. No human partridge has ever more energetically fluttered to detract attention from the presence of her young. Mrs. Velrose is a prodigious talker. A mother who is a prodigious talker occupies a very important place in a girl’s fortunes.
_Yes, Mrs. Velrose is too late. Rollington and his companion have emerged from the bower into the path that skirts the pine grove. Probably they are going down to that wooded point by the lake shore. There is a rustic seat there.... Yes, that is where they are going._
Beyond doubt, the sweet inanities of courtship would be less sweet if not threatened with observation and interruption. The side glances of the world, the caution of parents, the inhibitions of society all play their parts.
_Mrs. Velrose has abandoned the papilio ajax. She is coming back._
A daughter is a great responsibility. But so also is a mother. It is wrong to suppose that children feel no sense of responsibility for their progenitors. That larger education which so many women receive vicariously when their daughters go to college is one enforcing nice discrimination upon the educator as well as upon the educated. The American does not object to being governed. He only asks to select the machinery and the engineer. The American’s daughter expounds him. If every husband contrives to let his wife know how he likes to be managed, every daughter may find ways of making the yoke of her daughterhood exceeding light. In the debated matter of authority the American mother gives that she may receive. I don’t suppose there ever was a more perfect partnership, taken at its best, than the partnership of an American mother and her daughter, until marriage, which dissolves all other partnerships, brings its great readjustments....
Miss Velrose’s voice ... behind my chair. I must have dozed off for a while there.... Yes, it is Miss Velrose.
“It was an interesting picture,” laughed Miss Velrose from beyond the back of another chair, “‘Philosophy Asleep.’”
“Philosophy has been caught napping before this—and by Woman.”
“I should think Philosophy might need a good deal of sleep.”
“It learns more when it is awake.” I looked straight across into Miss Velrose’s burning blue eyes. “Where is Rollington?”
Miss Velrose underwent a slight change of color. “A person who has just awakened often asks such curious questions,” she said.
“I was awake a little while ago—when you were walking on the path leading from the pine grove. I wish you would be seated. It has been dull here. And you must be tired after walking from the Point.”
“I sha’n’t sit down unless you can explain why you are so well acquainted with my movements. Were you _tracking_ me?”
“Dear me, no! I had been sitting here reading the diary of a Puritan woman, Jonathan Edwards’ sister.”
“Prying into a woman’s diary.”
“That is what diaries are written for—to be pried into. What better luck could sister Esther ask than so reverent a reader. You must let me read you a few scraps of it. We shall let Rollington go for the present.”
She gave me a queer look and seated herself in profile. Few girls have a profile like Miss Velrose’s. She would delight a cameo cutter. Her nose is just right, and noses are important in profiles.
“You may see,” I said, “that even these Puritan girls had their troubles. It is on the first of May that sister Esther writes: ‘The time draws near when I must determine which of the two gentlemen to proceed with.’ _Which of the two_ gentlemen. Even in those days girls met with an embarrassment of riches. What strikes me is that they were very grateful. Her ‘considerable sense of spiritual things,’ in September, is followed by this declaration: ‘I was also in the evening stirred up to thankfulness by a new garment.’ Probably I never shall see your diary, Miss Velrose, but if I should it would be with no expectation of finding any thankfulness for the new garment. You modern girls take things dreadfully for granted.”
“I didn’t understand that you were to preach a sermon,” murmured Miss Velrose.