Part 8
“You have labelled me Philosophy, and Philosophy must expound. Listen again: ‘Thanked the Lord for more than usual comeliness of countenance.’ Imagine your expressing thanks for gifts in that direction! You take _them_ for granted, too. But here is an important point. I think I shall pigeonhole it for an essay on ‘The Antiquity of Feminine Skepticism.’ It was in 1739 that Miss Edwards wrote: ‘Mr. Hopkins praised me and I began to think that I was a clever creature and was much elated, but rejected all as coming from Satan.’ No flattery for sister Esther! Ah, Hopkins! you were almost clever enough! She ‘began to think’! If you had been a little more adroit she might have believed altogether,—and what a comfort it might have been to her! Probably, Hopkins, you didn’t give sufficient attention to the little accessories. Maybe there was no romantic balcony handy,—or an arbor on the edge of a grove; perhaps not even a rustic seat on a wooded point overlooking a lovely violet lake.”
“The trouble is,” said Miss Velrose, “that men are so poor in invention. They are very dependent on accessories.”
“But their dependence on accessories, on a correct setting for the scene, is the result, first, of a becoming diffidence; second, of an evolved delicacy. Let us suppose, for a moment, that a fellow is proposing to a girl.”
“How droll!” said Miss Velrose, still keeping her profile in position.
“In other words, fancy the most delicate situation in the processes of civilization. He has a certain thing to ask; she has a certain thing to answer. When it has gone so far, it is not so much what he asks as how he asks it. It is like lighting a Welsbach lamp. Sometimes it blazes up in a yellow, smoky flame. Then you have to turn it out and start again. You never can tell why the flame acts so. The flame has its own reasons for coquetting with the match.”
Miss Velrose gave a little snort.
“Of course the girl has the advantage. That is as it should be. It is like one of those suits in court where the defendant has the affirmative. She knows what he is going to ask. He doesn’t know what she is going to answer—then. She doesn’t know how many times he can be made to ask—whether there is more than one ask in him. There is a presumptive limit to his persistency and to her discrimination. If a girl is far enough gone, time, place and manner are of no importance. If she doesn’t like him quite so well, she might waive time and place, perhaps. There are infinite variations.”
“I was afraid you were going through them all,” said Miss Velrose.
“But above everything,” I pursued in defiance of Miss Velrose’s irony, “he must be definite. I once heard a girl say, ‘I believe I was proposed to last night, but I am not sure.’ Some men weakly dread to ask the old question in the old way. They introduce dangerous artistic variations.”
“Generally,” declared Miss Velrose, “it isn’t art; it is caution. They wish to be dead sure before they are quite definite. They are like governments who throw out a hint of a proposed movement to see how much and how many of the newspapers will howl.”
“You think he should plunge in with a gambler’s defiance. You justify the gambling instinct when woman is the stakes.”
“It is cowardly to want to be sure.”
“It is worse than cowardly, for a man never can be sure. Yet a proposal is a big investment to a sensitive man. He can’t afford as many proposals as she can.”
“How could you like him unless he dared to lose all? If he is sure, the greater part of the compliment is absent. The greater the odds against him, the more it will hurt him to lose, the finer the honor he pays her.”
“Yet because he wants to win he must attend to every point. I only wish to defend him against your accessories imputation. There are kinds of courage you wouldn’t wish him to have. He may look an enemy in the eye, but he must not face the woman to whom he proposes if he wishes her to believe that he has a spark of sensibility. I once heard a man say that when he proposed he sat opposite a mirror. The brute!”
Miss Velrose’s cameo relaxed, and dissolved into a three-quarter view as her burning blue eyes turned toward me.
“Don’t!” I cried. “Don’t look at me that way, or I shall have to stop expounding! You prove that what I say is doubly true. Suppose she looked at _him_ that way when he was in the middle of it?”
“Suppose that was part of her test?”
“Impossible! Not in that crisis. The presumption is that she has inflicted that at an earlier stage. To be sure, if she wants to pile on the agony there is no one to prevent her. Be honest—shouldn’t you be afraid to live with a man who could look you in the eye when he proposed? Should you expect him to anticipate composedly living with a girl who could look him in the eye when she answered him?”
Miss Velrose laughed softly. “What do you suppose Lady Mary Montagu meant when she said that women see men with their ears? Didn’t she mean that they listen too much? Didn’t she mean that we should go into matrimony with our eyes open?”
“I have not the presumption to analyze the cynicism of Lady Mary. She said some rather mean things about men. But let that go. You never could even imitate her. It isn’t at all in your line. I am sure of that or I shouldn’t tease you.”
“Are you teasing me?” she asked, lifting her brows and lowering her lashes.
“Does that mean that no one ever has dared to tease you, and that you don’t even know the signs? When Rollington teases you, is it very different?”
“Rollington never teased me.”
“‘Never _teased_ me.’ _Teased_—past tense. Then I am right.”
Miss Velrose’s eyes were not as steady as she could have wished. She is a good tease herself. I owed her a few grudges. “Right about what?” she asked with a charming effect of indifference.
“Right about that rustic bench. Forgive me. A man so seldom is right that you can’t expect him to be wholly composed when he blunders into anything.”
“It is nice to see you so easily pleased. But just as a matter of reasonableness,” added Miss Velrose, “a past tense might have two meanings.”
“True,” I admitted. “It might. I admit that. But when one alternative is supported by unmistakable signs why consider the other? Look at Rollington.”
She bit her lip, and did not turn her head. Rollington was sauntering up the path from the boathouse. He was endeavoring to look _ennuyé_.
“He is trying to look calm,” I said, “but it is a case of radiant repression. Rollington is a fine fellow. Sometimes the right thing happens. I am going to be more of an optimist than ever—even though you may never speak to me again.”
“There are several things,” said Miss Velrose very steadily, but with a little amused flutter of the lips, “which some one should say to you.”
“Oh, some one has!” I answered, getting up. “Don’t feel that you have to discipline me merely from a sense of duty.”
“I abandon you to your own conscience.”
“What cruelty!—you knowing that it is a Scotch conscience!”
“Your sophistry will help you out,” said Miss Velrose, in a voice as if she knew that Rollington was very near.
“I have at least one virtue,” I said. “I can keep a secret.”
A proposition which is perfectly apparent.
X
WITH A BRIDE
They were playing the ballet music from “Sylvia” in the loggia, a levity which no one resented, not even the old gentleman with the pale daughter, and the unctuous wheeze of the clarionette floated through the palms of the court where the fountain was flinging diamonds into the sunlight of a Southern February. The Spanish banners flapped lazily at the gate. No one resented them either, for it was a good six months since we had been at war with Spain. Moreover, St. Augustine never had been at war with Spain. It wouldn’t have been right.
The old gentleman was reading a St. Louis newspaper. The pale daughter was looking out through the arch toward the Alcazar. Near at hand were two youngish women with books in their laps. I could hear one saying to the other: “You see Virgil stole from Homer, and Dante was Virgil’s pupil. Dante gave credit to Virgil, but Virgil didn’t give credit to anybody.” Evidently this fellow Virgil was a rascal.
The Druggles party had returned from the links, and the general had a story about a tremendous drive of his that carried his ball among the prisoners at San Marco, and his little brush, afterward, with the guard at the gate. Mrs. Willie Roysell of Boston was complaining at the news that if you went to any of the hotels further South you would have to sleep on the steps.
I had just parted from Mrs. Roysell when I saw Madge Emmerton pass under the portcullis. I knew her despite the veil and the shadow of her broad hat. With one hand she held the loose of her white piqué. In the other she was managing a purse and some small packages that suggested the bazars down the street.
When we each had said how surprised we were, and had taken chairs in the shade, she looked at me suddenly and said, “I don’t believe you know.”
“Know what?” I bluntly returned, looking into her radiant face.
“Of course you don’t. You never could do it so well. And you would have had the grace to ask after him.”
“Well,” I said, “I haven’t had time to ask after anybody yet. Please explain, so that I can ask intelligently. Are you married or anything of that sort?”
She nodded frankly.
It all came back to me then. Two of the handsomest young men in Philadelphia were in a state of intense willingness when I last saw her. But she was not one of whom it ever was possible to guess whom or when she would marry. And I never had heard a word of the engagement. There was a great disparity in the financial resources of the two men, and, as it had seemed from informed comment, some disparity also in their intellectual resources. It is only fair to Providence to say that it had generously given the great talents to the man without money.
“Which one did you marry?” I asked. “The poor one or the rich one?”
“The rich one,” she replied with an entirely unembarrassed laugh.
“So that the poor one is now doubly poor, and the rich one doubly rich.”
“No,” she said, “that wouldn’t be fair. I shall make the rich one a little poorer and leave the poor one to be richer.”
“Oh, I dare say it is pure altruism. But where is he? The new idea of marriage may imply strictly preserved personalities, but I always have fancied that husband and wife were quite indivisible on their bridal tour at least.”
“How absurd! As if it wouldn’t be more dangerous to have him tire of me now than at any later time. I send him away every afternoon somewhere.”
“Poor fellow!”
“And I have been off buying St. Augustine souvenirs made in Philadelphia. Then I had a lot of little commissions. I promised my brother Cliff to send him a live alligator. I have just been buying it in that funny St. George’s Street.”
“I didn’t notice it as you came in. Have you hitched him at the gate?”
“Oh, no! he’s only a baby and goes by mail.”
I glanced at her purse. “‘In her left hand riches.’”
“Which is to say, ninety cents. Think of you quoting Scripture!”
“You should be glad I didn’t say ‘Yielding pacifieth great offences.’”
“I have more than a suspicion that you are thinking things you won’t say.”
“Which would be futile, for you would know what I was thinking.”
“What were you thinking?”
“Perhaps of an inappropriate topic—marriage.”
“How interesting! Tell me about it!”
“It would be more sensible of me to go and find your husband and tell him he may come back, that you are dying to see him, and that you have spent all but ninety cents.”
“Do you really think I am mean to send him away? Isn’t that a good idea of mine?”
“It is an excellent theory. I like it. But I hate to see either of you able to carry it out.”
“He isn’t able. He isn’t carrying it out. He is only doing what he is told.”
“You have begun well.”
“It is great fun—he never will obey so implicitly again.”
“I doubt that. The habit of obedience once formed is tenacious in husbands as in others.”
“I hope not. I should hate to have him stay so obedient. Don’t you think it nice of him to recognize my claims that on a bridal tour the bride must have her own way?”
“Yes,” I admitted. “I do, and not the less nice of him because letting you have your own way is so dangerous.”
“He seems to be utterly insensible to danger. It is charming.”
“It is interesting to find that you have begun to understand him already. Dr. Johnson once said that few people who have lived with a man know what is remarkable about him. Probably he was right. Mrs. Johnson is known to have said that her husband was the most remarkable man she ever met, but there is no evidence that she knew _what_ was remarkable about him.”
“There is nothing remarkable about Bert. It is one of his charms. I remember once that when mother was telling me I should acquire certain practical accomplishments upon which I might fall back in case of accident, I said that none of the professions attracted me, and that I preferred to be ‘just a plain lady.’ Well, Bert is just a plain gentleman. Are you laughing to hear me praise him?”
“I was not laughing. I was wondering whether you said such nice things to him—whether you thought it would be good for discipline.”
“Of course I say those things to him. When a woman marries a man she pays him the biggest compliment one human creature can pay another. Nothing that she can _say_ after that can seem excessive, can it?”
“And yet, it will make quite a difference to him, I fancy, whether you do say those things or not. He paid you a compliment when he asked you to marry him, as large a one as he could possibly. Yet you will like to have him say things once in a while.”
She gave a little unreadable laugh. “Somehow I don’t expect to spoil Bert. Because he is just a plain gentleman, and not a genius or anything like that, I am not so nervous about him.”
“He ought to be very grateful. I have no doubt but that he is grateful. Do you know, I think you are quite as practical as if you were fashionably flippant and cynical? We always are drawing on our imaginations or our bank account. Undoubtedly we should be careful to avoid an overdraft. Marriage is a sort of promissory note.”
“That sometimes goes to protest?”
“That sometimes go to protest. It is a kind of duet, too, a duet in which it is not so important that the quality of the voices shall be the same as that they shall agree, first, to sing the same tune, and second, to sing it in the same key.”
“Yes,” she said, “I can see that the key is very important, even if he had to hum or whistle. Which reminds me that Bert can scarcely tell one tune from another. It was General Grant, wasn’t it, who only recognized two tunes?—one was ‘Yankee Doodle’ and the other wasn’t. But Bert likes music—my music.”
“I believe you—I believe him. And that will always be a great help when it comes to managing him.”
“Yes, Bert will need considerable managing,—what you might call minor managing. I don’t pretend that he is free from that necessity.”
“He will just need managing enough to keep you pleasantly occupied. It is not good for man to be unmanaged. Let none that wait on thee be ashamed.”
“Are you quite sure you are not agreeing with me about everything just to be nice?”
“Quite sure. Though it is true that no one should or could quarrel with a bride.”
“Except the bridegroom. You would be surprised to know how many bridal-tour quarrels I have heard of.”
“Who tells?”
“The participants—long afterward; and not always so long afterward either. I have a friend who told me when she came home from her tour. And guess what it was about?”
“I couldn’t.”
“Whether he or she should pay for some caramels. So you see there are bridal quarrels, and they are confessed.”
“It is a pity.”
“The quarrels or the telling?”
“Both. But I suppose people who are low enough to quarrel would be low enough to tell.”
“It doesn’t seem likely that I shall quarrel with Bert. You see we are such good friends.”
“That should make a difference. Perhaps that isn’t a common situation. To be sure, you American girls are credited with inventing that idea—the idea of marrying a friend.”
“Whom should we marry—our enemies? We are told to love them, but not to marry them.”
“They once seemed to divide society for a woman into friends, enemies, and husbands. The husband was—just a husband. When a husband has been a friend—”
“I see. You make marriage a sort of post-graduate course in friendship. I must tell Bert that I shall have something to add to his M. A.”
“Yes,” I said, “Master of Hearts.”
“I should like that better if it were not plural. It sounds too promiscuous. Bert isn’t at all promiscuous.”
“Let me see—_Magister amoris_: that is scarcely definite enough either. But Bert has acquired something more important than a degree—he has acquired a detached and supplemental conscience to which he may look for a candor even greater than that of his own.”
“I am to be a conscience to him, am I?” she asked.
“But a proper and effective conscience, a conscience that acquires a controlling power, has, I need not tell you, a still, small voice. In this, minor managing of yours, in the process of which you will act as Bert’s detached conscience, you must be very dexterous. It has been said that the secret of being a bore is to tell everything. It is the same way with consciences. A conscience that told everything, that didn’t know when to be inaudible, would get to be—ineffective. All of which it is quite unnecessary to say to you.”
“O, I don’t know!” laughed the bride. “I enjoy being warned a little. It makes it all seem excitingly difficult.”
“You mean being warned a little more, for you must have been warned a great deal already.”
“Yes. All of one’s friends help a little. Marriage is like a country surprise party each guest of which has been asked to ‘Please furnish Advice.’ Aunt Levina said: ‘My dear, marriage is like medicine—it isn’t so much what you take as what you believe it is going to do.’ Papa said: ‘Madge, girl, ask your mother how she hypnotized me. That is the most painless way it can possibly be done.’ Mother said simply: ‘Always be his sweetheart;’ which amounts to about the same, I suppose, as Mrs. Kansett’s counsel: ‘Make all other women seem less interesting to him than yourself.’ Major Carringward said: ‘Boss him, Madge; boss him. But never boss him when he is bossing you.’ You see it was all nice and easy. I shouldn’t have any trouble at all.”
“I was wondering,” I said, “while you were enumerating these items of advice, what sort of directions they gave to Bert—I mean beyond ‘Be good to her, my boy.’ If they give a man less advice, perhaps it is because there is less latitude for advice to him. ‘Be good to her’ is a comprehensive gospel for him. Then it may be that she gets more advice because the situation really is more in her hands. Anyway, it begins to look as if the world had begun to insist that he shall be good to her. Even the world’s advice to her is advice looking to that end. That all the world loves a lover means nothing more than that. The lover who stops loving has lost the world’s love as well as everything else.”
“I must tell you,” said the bride, “what brother Cliff said not long ago. He had been sitting at the window studying _Life_ a long time, when he looked up and said: ‘Mama, aren’t there any happy married people?’ We all laughed. Probably that didn’t make the matter any clearer to Cliff.”
“We shouldn’t draw too severe an inference from satire. Perhaps satire is like news—it exploits the variations, the unusual. It takes happy marriages for granted, which is what nature does about everything that goes rightly. That’s what my friend the editor tells me. ‘Why!’ he says, ‘the biggest compliment we can pay virtue is to advertise vice. Can’t you see that we stamp vice as exceptional when we class scandals with accidents?’ Yet it is too bad that we have to hear so much more about the failures than the successes. It is likely to have an effect upon us at times such as you observed in your young brother. Marriage is not only what they that marry make it. It is also what the onlookers make it. To paraphrase Dr. Johnson’s saying about books, marriage should help us either to enjoy life or to endure it, and if it is to go on filling that great office it is quite important that you American girls, who are credited with introducing so many modifications, should keep this in mind.”
“I don’t know that I should feel quite comfortable,” said the bride, “if I thought that so much really was left to me. It would be a great responsibility—greater, I think, than I should care to take up. You and the rest must forgive me if I forget all the advice.”
“That is just what we all should hope that you will do. A woman’s reason is the best of all reasons—especially for friendship and love. A friendship that could be explained would be stamped with inferiority. We love our friend—because. We marry whom we marry—because, and we may thank Providence that it is so.”
“Yes,” she said, looking very earnestly at me, “when it is ‘because,’ it is more likely to last, I think.”
Then a sudden change came into her face, the loveliest change that ever can come into a girl’s face. I knew that he was walking up the path.
“There’s Bert! And I don’t think I have told you yet—definitely,” she said, leaning forward and speaking with her eyes toward the path, “that I liked him much better than the other from the very beginning. I only waited long enough to be quite sure that that was true.”
There was something he wanted to show her in one of the bazars, something he wanted to get for her if she liked it, and presently they went down the path, under the palms, and out under the portcullis, the bride and the groom laughing together....
And the fountain is still flinging diamonds into the sunlight. The shadows are a little longer. I wonder if the band has played its last piece? I wonder if _my_ bride isn’t really through with all those letters over there in the writing room? I just found myself staring across the court, past the palms, and the fountain, and the loggia. I fancied the bride of long ago coming under the portcullis on her palfrey, a shining knight by her side. I saw the bride of peasant Europe, wreathed and radiant, her strong hand on her husband’s arm. I saw the Puritan bride on John Alden’s “snow white bull” riding happily home. I saw the bride of the young Republic laughing from under her bonnet into the smooth face of her Revolutionary soldier. I saw the bride of the South at the door of the family coach, the proud old black driver in his seat, the air full of sweet odors and merry cries. I saw the bride of the West riding her mustang over fresh trails to the miner’s cabin, or over the silent prairie to the ranch of hope. I saw the bride of the farm go away to the noise and smoke of the city. I saw the bride of the city follow her hero unquestioningly into bleak and lonesome solitudes. I saw the bride who had won the honors of the world put aside trophies and prizes for the simple joy of creating a home....
Ah! here are the bride and the groom coming back! I knew their silhouette in a moment under the arch. And how fortunate—it was not the last piece! The band is playing again! I wonder if they are too absorbed to notice that it is playing the most important part of “Lohengrin”?