Chapter 17

RUBBING ELBOWS

"Chicago, Illinois.

"Dearly Beloveds:

"Nearly I am converted to matrimony as a life career. Almost I feel it is worth the sacrifice of independence, the death of originality, the banishment of special friendship, and the monotonous bondage of rigid routine.

"I have just come back from Mount Mark, where I had my second visit with little Julia. She is worth the giving up of anything, and the enduring of everything. She is marvelous.

"When I first saw her, just after Aunt Grace brought her home,--I think I told you that I went without a new pair of lovely gray shoes at ten dollars a pair in order to go to Mount Mark to meet her,--she was very sweet, and all that, but when they are so rosily new they are more like scientific curiosities than literary inspirations. But I have met her again, and I am everlastingly converted to the domestic enslavement of women. One little Julia is worth it. So as soon as I find the husband, I am going to cultivate my eleven children. You remember that was the career I picked out in the days of my tender youth.

"Her face is big and round and white, and her eyes are bluer than any summer sky the poets could rave about. Her lips are the original Cupid's bow,--in fact, Julia's lips have about convinced me that Cupid must have been a woman, certainly he could ask no more deadly weapon for shattering the hearts of men. Her hair is comical. It is yellow gold, but it sticks straight out in every direction. It is the most aggravatingly, irresistibly defiant hair you ever saw in your life. It makes you kiss it, and brush it, and soak it in water, and shake Julia for having it, and then fall in love with her all over again.

"She is just beginning to talk. When I arrived the whole family was assembled to do me honor, Prudence and Fairy, Lark and all the babies. Julia seemed to resent her temporary eclipse in the limelight. She crowed in a compelling way, and when I advanced to bow reverently before her, she pointed a fat, accusing finger at me, and said, 'Who is 'at?' Her very first word,--and no presidential message ever provoked half the storm of approval her little phrase called forth. We laughed, and kissed each other, and begged her to say it again, and Prudence said 'Oh, if Carol could have heard that,' and then we all rushed off and cried and scolded each other for being so silly, and Julia screamed. Oh, it was a formal afternoon reception all right.

"And I am putting a little three-line ad in the morning _Tribune_. 'Young, accomplished, attractive lady without means, of strong domestic tendencies, desires a husband, eugenic, rich, good looking. Object matrimony.'

"Of course I know that I repeat myself. But if you don't say 'Object matrimony,' some men wouldn't catch the point.

"And so you are out of the San and keeping house again. A brand-new honeymoon, of course, and cooing doves, and chiming bells, and all the rest of it. When the rest of us back here write to each other, we say at the end, 'Carol is well and David is better.' It conveys the idea of a Thanksgiving service and a hallelujah chorus. It means Good night, God bless you, and Merry Christmas, all in one.

"By the way, do you remember William Canfield Brewer, the original advertiser who got moved out when I moved in? Well, between you and me, almost for a while I did begin to see some charms in matrimony. He came again, and was properly introduced. And took me for a drive,--it seems he had just collected his salary,--and he came again, and we went to the park, and he came again. And that was when I began to see the halo around the wedding bells. One night he was telling me his experiences in saving money,--uproariously funny, my dear, for he never could save more than five dollars a month, and ran in debt fifteen dollars to encompass it. He said:

"'My wife used to say it was harder work for me to carry my salary home from the office than to earn it right at the start.'

"I laughed,--I thought of course it was a joke. I guess the laugh was revealing, for he turned around suddenly and said:

"'You knew I was married, didn't you, Connie?' First time he ever called me Connie.

"Well, the halo vanished like a flash and hasn't got back yet.

"I said, 'No, I didn't know it.'

"'Why, everybody knows it,' he expostulated.

"'I did not.'

"'We are devoted to each other,' he said, laughing lightly, 'but we find our devotion wears better at long distance. So she lives wherever I do not, and we get along like birdies in their little nest. I haven't seen her for two years.'

"Then he went on with his financial experiences, evidently calling the subject closed.

"When he started home, he said, 'Well, what shall we do Sunday?'

"'Nothing, together. You are married.'

"'Well, I don't get any fun out of it, do I?'

"'No, maybe not. But I have a hunch I won't get much fun out of it, either.'

"'I forgot about the parsonage.' He considered a moment. 'All right, I'll hunt her up and have her get a divorce,' he volunteered cheerfully.

"He was very puzzled and perplexed when I vetoed that. He says I can't have the true artistic temperament, I am so ghastly religious. At any rate, I have not seen him since, and have not answered his notes. Now, don't weep over me, Carol, and think my young affections were trifled with. They weren't--because they didn't have time. But I am not taking any chances.

"Henceforth I get my sentiment second hand.

"The girl at our table, Emily Jarvis, who is a spherist, attributes all the good fortune that has come to you and David to the fact that at heart you are in harmony with the spheres. You don't know what a spherist is, and neither do I. But it includes a lot of musical terms, and metaphors, and is something like Christian Science and New Thought, only more so. Spherists believe in a life of harmony, and somehow or other they get the spheres back of it, and believe in immaterial matter, and that all physical manifestations are negative, and the only positive, or affirmative, is 'harmony.'

"Emily is very, very pretty, and that sort of excuses her for digging into the intricacies of spheral harmonies. Even such unmitigated nonsense as sphere control, spirit harmony, and mental submission, assumes a semblance of dignity when expounded by her cherry-red lips. She speaks vacuously of being under world-dominance, and has absolutely no physical consciousness. She says so herself. If she ignores her tempting curves and matchless softness, she is the only one in the house who does. In fact, it is only the attraction of her very physical being, which she denies, that lends a species of sense to her harmonious converse. She and I are great friends. She says I am a harmonizer on the inside.

"She is engaged to a man across the hall, Rodney Carter. She has the room next to mine. His voice is deep and carrying, hers is clear and ringing, and the walls are thin. So I have benefited by most of their courtship. But the course of true love, you know. She has tried spiritually and harmoniously to convert him to immaterialism, but Rodney is very conscious of his physical, muscular, material being, and he hoots at her derisively, but tenderly.

"'Oh, cut it out, Emily,' he said, one evening. 'We can only afford one spirit in the family. One of us has got to earn a living. Spirits, it seems, require plenty of steak and potatoes to keep them in harmony. I could not conscientiously lead you to the altar, even a spheral altar, if I were not prepared to pay house rent and coal bills. One's enough, you can be our luxury.'

"'But, Rod, if you are in harmony you can earn our living so much more easily. You must get above this notion of material necessities. There are no such things.'

"'I don't believe it,' he interrupted coldly. 'There are material necessities. You are one of them. The most necessary in the world. You may be harmonious, but you are material, too. That is why I love you. I couldn't be crazy about a melodious breath of air ghosting around the back yard. And I am not strong for disembodied minds, either. They make me nervous. They sound like skulls and cross-bones, and whitening skeletons to me. I love you, your arms, your face, all of you. It may not be proper to talk about it, but I love it. Can you imagine our minds embracing each other, thrilling at the contact,--oh, it's tommyrot. A fool--'

"'It may be tommyrot to you, Rod,' said Emily haughtily. 'But the inspiration of the matchless minds of the mystic men of the Orient--'

"'Inspiration of idiocy. What do mystic men of the Orient know about warm-blooded Americans, dead in love? I might kiss the air until I was blue in the face,--nothing to it,--but let me kiss you, and we are both aquiver, and--'

"'Rodney Carter, don't you dare say such things,' she cried furiously. 'It is insulting. Besides it has nothing to do with it. It isn't so anyhow. And what is more--'

"'There's nothing mysterious about us. Let the old Chinesers pad around in their bare feet and naked souls if they want to. We are children of light, we are, creatures of earth, earthly. We're--'

"'Oh, I can't argue with you, Rod,' she began confusedly.

"'I don't want you to. Kiss me. One kiss, Emily mine, will confound the whole united order of Maudlin Mystics. I am willing to risk all the anathemas contained in an inharmonious sphere for one touch of your lips. Go ahead with your sacred doctrine of universal and spiritual imbecility, but soften its harshness with worldly, physical, sin-suggesting kisses, and I am in tune with the infinite.'

"Then Emily broke the engagement, and Rodney, after relieving himself of more heretical opinions of spiritual simplicity and mystic madness, stalked unmelodiously away, slamming her door, and his own after it.

"What I didn't hear of it myself, Emily told me afterward, for we are very confidential.

"The whole house was intensely interested in the dénouement. Rodney sat stolidly at his table, crunching his food, gazing reproachfully and adoringly at Emily's proudly lifted head. Emily, for all her unconsciousness of physical necessity, lost her appetite, and grew pale. The mental and physical may have nothing in harmony, as she says, but certainly her mental upheaval resulting from the lack of Rodney's demonstrations of love, affected her physical appetite as well as her complexion.

"When Rodney met Emily in the halls, he made her life miserable.

"'Good morning, Long Sin Coo.' 'Hello, Ghostie.' 'Hey, Spirit, may I borrow a nip of brandy to make an ethereal cocktail for my imaginary nightcap?'

"And he opened his transom and took to talking to himself out loud. So Emily decided to close her transom. It stuck. She asked my assistance, and we balanced a chair on a box and I held it steady while she got up to oil the transom. But first she would lose her balance, then she would drop the oil can, then the box would slip. She couldn't reach the joints, or whatever you call them, and when she stood on tiptoe she lost her balance. Then she got her finger in the joint and pinched it, emitting a most material squeal as she did so. Happening to glance through the transom, she saw Rodney standing below in the hall, grinning at her with inharmonious, unspiritual, unsentimental glee, and she tugged viciously at the transom, banging herself off the box, upsetting the chair, and squirting oil all over me as she fell.

"Rodney rushed to the rescue, but Emily was already scrambling into sitting posture, scared, bruised and furious. She had torn her dress, twisted her ankle, bumped her head and scratched her face. And Rodney had seen it.

"Ignoring me, Rodney sat down on the box and looked her over with cold professional eyes.

"'My little seeker after truth,' he said, 'you are a mystic combination of spirit and mind. You are in tune with the infinite spheres. You are a breath in a universal breeze. Therefore you feel no inconvenience. Get up, my child, and waltz an Oriental hesitation down the hall and convince yourself everlastingly that you are in truth only a mysterious unit in a universe of harmonic chords.'

"Emily dropped her head on the oil can, lifted up her voice and wept. And Rodney, with an exclamation that a minister's daughter can not repeat, took the unhappy mystic into his arms.

"'Sweetheart, forgive me. I am a brute, I know. Knock me on the head with the oil can, won't you? Don't cry, sweetheart,--Emily, don't.'

"Finally Emily spoke. 'You are as mean and hateful as you can be, Rodney Carter,' she said, burrowing more deeply into his shoulder. 'And I despise you. And I am going to marry you, too, just to get even with you. Give me back my engagement ring.' Rodney ecstatically did. The touch of her lovely, material body must have thrilled him, for he kissed her all over the top of the head, her face being hidden.

"I stood my ground. I was looking for literary material since I never have a chance to make romance for myself. Emily spoke again.

"'I know now that the Vast Infinite intends us for each other. I have been dwelling in Perfect Harmony the last four days, trusting the All Perfection to bring us together again. So I know that our union was decreed from the foundation by the Universal sphere. I tell you, Rod, you can't get ahead of the Infinite.'

"Then I went to my own room, and they never knew when I left,--they didn't even remember I had been there. But as I came back from answering the phone at eleven o'clock, I met Rod in the hall. He had some books in his hand. He ducked them behind him when he saw me. I reached for them sternly, and he pulled them out rather sheepishly. I read the titles, 'Spheral Mentality,' 'Infinite Spheres,' 'Spheral Harmony.'

"'Made me promise to read 'em, too,' he confided in a whisper. 'And by George, she is worth it.'

"Oh, I tell you, Carol, these boarding-houses are chuck full of literary material. Really, I am developing. I know it. I feel it every day. I rub elbows with every one I meet, and I like it. I don't care if they aren't 'My Kind' at all. I am learning to reach down to the same old human nature back of all the different kinds. Isn't that growth?

"You asked about the millionaire's son. He still comes to see me every once in a while. He says he can't promise to let me spend all of his millions for missions if I marry him,--says he has too much fun spending them on himself,--but he insists that I may do whatever I like with him. Isn't it too bad I can't feel called upon to take him in hand?

"Anyhow, if I had a million dollars do you know what I would do? Buy an orphans' home, and dump 'em all in a big ship and go sailing, sailing over the bounding main. I'd kidnap Julia and take her along.

"He was here last week, and sent his love to you, and best wishes to David. He told me to ask particularly how your complexion gets along out in the sunny mesa land.

"I want to see you. I am saving up my pennies religiously, and when they have multiplied sufficiently I am coming. Thanks for the invitation.

"Lovingly as always,

"Connie."