Part 14

Lucius rose, too. “You know what I think about you, all the time, Jennie,” he said genially. “John, if you can remember where you put my umbrella when we came in, it’s about time for me to be catching a street-car down to the station.”

She opposed him with a passionate gesture. “No!” she cried fiercely. “You can’t say such things to me and then slip out like that! You tell me I’ve taught my child to be a coward and that I’ve made a spoilt brat of him——”

“Jennie!” he protested. “I was talking about _me_!”

“Shame on you to pretend!” she said. “You think I’m making John _hate_ Luddie——”

“_Jennie!_” he shouted in genuine astonishment.

“You do! And you come here pretending to be such a considerate, sympathetic friend—and every minute you’re criticizing and condemning me in your heart for all my little stories to my child—all because—because—” suddenly she uttered a dry sob—“because I want to raise my boy to be a—a poet!”

“John,” said Lucius desperately, “_do_ you think you can find that umbrella?”

With almost startling alacrity John rose and vanished from the room, and Lucius would have followed, but the distressed lady detained him. She caught a sagging pocket of his coat, and he found it necessary to remain until she should release him.

“You sha’n’t!” she cried. “Not till you’ve taken back that accusation.”

“But what accusa——”

“Shame on you! Ah, I didn’t think you’d ever come here and do such a thing to me. And this morning I was looking forward to a happy day! It’s a good thing you’re a bachelor!”

With which final insult she hurled his pocket from her—at least that was the expression of her gesture—and sank into a chair, weeping heart-brokenly. “You don’t understand!” she sobbed. “How could any man understand—or any woman not a mother! You think these hard things of me, but—but John doesn’t always love Luddie. Don’t you get even a little glimpse of what that means to me? There are times when John doesn’t even _like_ Luddie!”

“Take care,” said Lucius gently. “Take care that those times don’t come oftener.”

She gasped, and would have spoken, but for a moment she could not, and was able only to gaze at him fiercely through her tears. Yet there was a hint of fear behind the anger.

“You dare to say such a thing as that to a mother?” she said, when she could speak.

Lucius’s eyes twinkled genially; he touched her upon the shoulder, and she suffered him. “Mother,” he said lightly, “have pity on your child!” Somehow, he managed to put more solemnity into this parting prayer of his than if he had spoken it solemnly; and she was silent.

Then he left the room, and, on his way, stumbled over a chair, as he usually did at the dramatic moments in his life.

John was standing in the open doorway, Lucius’s umbrella in his hand. “I think I hear a car coming, old fellow,” he said.

“Got to get my hat,” Mr. Allen muttered. He had been reminded of something; a small straw hat, with a blue ribbon round it, was upon the table, and he fumbled with it a moment before seizing his own and rushing for the door at the increasing warning of a brass gong in the near distance. Thus, when he had gone, a silver dollar was pocketed within the inside band of the small straw hat with the blue ribbon. . . . John Thomas, returning in sharp trepidation to the lovely, miserable figure in the library, encountered one of the many surprises of his life.

“He never could tell the truth to save his life!” she said. “He doesn’t know what truth _means_! Did you hear him sitting up there and telling us he was ‘an only child’? He has a brother and four sisters living, and I don’t know how many dead!”

“You don’t mean it!” said John, astounded. “That certainly was pecu——”

He lost his breath at that moment. She rose and threw her arms round him with the utmost heartiness. “He’s such an old smart Aleck!” she cried, still weeping. “That’s why I married you instead of him. I love you for not being one! If you want to spank Luddie for telling that story about his wrist I wish you’d go and wake him up and do it!”

“No,” said John. “Lucius called to me as he was running for the car that he’s going to be married next week. I’ll wait and spank one of his children. They’ll be the worst spoiled children in the world!”

LADIES’ WAYS

TWO young people, just out of college and pleasing to the eye, ought to appreciate the advantage of living across the street from each other: but Miss Muriel Eliot’s mood, that summer, was so advanced and intellectual that she found all round about her only a cultural desert, utterly savourless. This was her own definition of her surroundings, and when she expressed herself thus impressively to Mr. Renfrew Mears, the young gentleman who lived directly opposite her, he was granted little choice but to suppose himself included among the unspiced vacancies she mentioned. “The whole deadly environment crushes me,” she told him, as they paused at her gate on returning from a walk. “This town is really a base thing.”

“Do you think so, Muriel?” he said. “Well, I don’t know; around here it’s a right pleasant place to live—nice big yards and trees and all. And you know the population is increasing by fifteen to twenty thousand every year. The papers say——”

“Listen, Renfrew,” she interrupted, and then said deliberately: “It is a cultural desert, utterly savourless!”

When she had spoken in this way, the first feeling of young Mr. Mears appeared to be one of admiration, and perhaps she understood, or even expected, that some such sensation on his part would be inevitable, for she allowed her eyes to remain uplifted gloomily toward the summer sky above them, so that he might look at her a little while without her seeming to know it. Then she repeated slowly, with a slight shake of the head: “Yes—a cultural desert, utterly savourless!”

But Renfrew now became uneasy. “You mean the _looks_ of the place and the——”

“I mean the whole environment,” she said. “These Victorian houses with their Victorian interiors and the Victorian thoughts of the people that live in ’em. It’s all, _all_ Victorian!”

“‘Victorian?’” said Renfrew doubtfully, for he was far from certain of her meaning. His vague impression was that the word might in some remote way bear upon an issue of bonds with which he had some recent familiarity through an inheritance from his grandfather. “You think it’s—Victorian—do you, Muriel?” he thought best to inquire.

“Absolutely!” she said. “Culturally it’s a Victorian desert and utterly savourless.”

“But you don’t mean all of it?” he ventured, being now certain that “Victorian” meant something unfavourable. “That is, not the people?”

“It’s the people I’m talking about,” explained Muriel coldly.

“Well—but not _all_ of ’em?”

“Yes, everybody!”

“You don’t mean every last one of ’em, though, do you, Muriel?” he asked plaintively.

“Yes, I do.”

“Well, but look here,” he said. “You couldn’t mean _that_. It would include your own family, and all your old family neighbours. Why, it might include some of your very best friends!”

She sighed. “Since I’ve come home, I’ve felt that really I had nothing in common with a single soul in the place. I don’t live on the same plane. I don’t think the same thoughts. I don’t speak the same language.”

He appeared to swallow a little air and to find some difficulty in doing so. “I know,” he said, “you do talk a lot more intellectually than the rest of us dubs around here. It’s because you’ve got a more intellectual nature, and everything like that; and that’s one of the reasons I look up to you the way I do. I always used to think that a girl that usually had an intellectual nature had to wear horn spectacles and have her dress higher on one side than it was on the other, and wear these sensible-looking shoes, and everything like that. But you’ve showed me I was mistaken, Muriel. You made me see that a girl could have an intellectual nature and be prettier and dress niftilier than all the brainless ones put together. But what worries _me_ is——” He paused uncomfortably, and repeated, “What worries _me_ is——” then paused again, and, with his head on one side, moved his forefinger to and fro between his collar and his neck as if he felt a serious tightness there.

“Well?” Muriel said, after waiting for some time. “Do you wish me to understand it’s your neckwear that worries you, Renfrew?”

“No,” he said absently, and frowning in his pained earnestness, again repeated: “What worries _me_ is——” Once more he stopped.

“Well, well!”

“It’s simply this,” he said. “What worries me is simply this. It’s like this. For instance, do you think it’s absolutely necessary for them _both_ to have an intellectual nature?”

“‘Both?’” she inquired. “What do you mean—‘both?’”

“I mean the man and the woman,” he said. “Do you think they _both_ have to have——”

“_What_ man and woman?”

“I mean,” said Renfrew, “I mean the husband and the wife.”

“Why, what in the world——”

“Would they _both_ have to have one?” he asked hopefully. “They wouldn’t _both_ have to have an intellectual nature, would they?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about,” she said with emphasis, though a delicate colour had risen in her cheeks, and people seldom blush on account of being puzzled. “I don’t believe you know what you mean, yourself.”

“Yes, I do,” he insisted, his earnestness constantly increasing. “I mean, for instance, wouldn’t it be all right for the woman to go on following her intellectual nature in her own way, if the man provided the house and the food and everything like that? Even if he didn’t have an intellectual nature himself, don’t you think they could get along together all right, especially if he respected hers and looked up to it and was glad she had one, and so—well, and so they could go on and on together—and on and on——”

“Renfrew!” she cried. “How long are _you_ going ‘on and on’ about nothing?”

He looked depressed. “I only meant—did you—did you really mean _everybody_, Muriel?”

“When?”

“When you said that about—about the savage desert that didn’t have any culture or anything.”

“That wasn’t what I said, Renfrew,” she reminded him, and her expression became one of cold disapproval. “I said, ‘A cultural!——’”

“Well, anyway,” he urged, “you didn’t really mean _everybody_, did you?”

“Seriously, Renfrew,” she said; “—seriously, I don’t understand how you can live the life you do.”

“Why, I’m not living any life,” he said reproachfully. “I never did do anything very dissipated.”

“I don’t mean that,” she returned impatiently. “I mean what are you doing with your mind, your soul, your spirit? You never have a thought that the common herd around us doesn’t have. You never read a book that the common herd doesn’t read, and you don’t even read many of _them_! What do you do with your time? I’m asking you!”

“Well, the truth is,” he said meekly, “if you come right down _to_ it: why, most of the time I loaf around in our front yard waiting to see if you’re not coming out or anything.”

His truthfulness did little to appease her. “Yes!” she said. “You sit hours and hours under that walnut tree over there in a perfect vacuum!”

“Well, it _is_ like that,” he agreed, “when you don’t come out, Muriel.”

“I’m not talking about anything of that sort!” she said quickly. “I mean, how can you bear to stay on such a plane? You don’t have to just sit down and live on what your grandfather left you, do you?”

“Well, _but_,” he protested, “I told you I was thinking of trying to run for the legislature!”

She stared at him. “Good heavens!” she said. “Do you think _that_ would be rising to a higher plane?”

“A person has to begin,” he ventured to remind her. “Even at that, they tell me I probably couldn’t get nominated till I tried for it two or three times. They tell me I have to keep on going around till I get well known.”

“Renfrew!”

“Well, I haven’t made up my mind about it,” he said. “I see you don’t think much of it, and I’m not sure I do, myself. What do you think I ought to do?”

“What do I think you ought to do?” she cried. “Why, do anything—_anything_ rather than be one of the commonplace herd on the commonplace plane!”

“Well, what do I have to do to get off of it?”

“What?”

“I mean, what’s the best way for me to get on some other plane, the kind you mean? If you think it’s no good my trying for the legislature, what do you think I _had_ better do?”

He asked for information; in all honesty he simply wanted to be told. “I just don’t know how to go about it,” he added; “I don’t know how to even start; that’s the trouble. What had I better do first?”

Muriel stared at him; for in truth, she found herself at a loss. Faced with a request for grovelling details of the lofty but somewhat indefinite processes she had sketched, she was as completely a vacancy as could be found in all the cultural desert about her.

“Really!” she said. “If you don’t know such things for yourself, I don’t believe you could ever find out from anybody else!”

In this almost epigrammatic manner she concealed from him—and almost from herself—that she had no instructions to give him; nor was she aware that she had employed an instinctive device of no great novelty. Self-protection inspires it wherever superiority must be preserved; it has high official and military usages, but is most frequently in operation upon the icier intellectual summits. Yet, like a sword with a poisonous hilt, it always avenges its victim, and he who employs it will be irritable for some time afterward—he is really irritated with himself, but naturally prefers to think the irritation is with the stupidity that stumped him.

Thus Muriel departed abruptly, clashing the gate for all her expression of farewell, and left startled young Mr. Mears standing there, a figure of obvious pathos. She went indoors, and, having ascended to her own room, presently sat down and engaged herself with writing materials. Little shadows of despondency played upon her charming forehead as she wrote:

“Life is so terrible! Far off—far, far—oh, infinitely distant—oh, Where far-flung fleets and argosies Of nobler thoughts abound Than those I find around me In this crass, provincial town, I must go! For I am lonely here, One lonely, lonely little figure Upbearing still one white, white light invisible. How could those see whose thoughts are all Of marts and churches, dancing, and the links?”

She paused to apply the blotter upon a tiny area of ink, oozed from the pen to her forefinger, which had pressed too ardently, being tense with creative art; and having thus broken the spell of composition, she glanced frowningly out of the window beside her desk. Across the way, she could see Renfrew Mears sitting under the walnut tree in his own yard. He was not looking toward her, but leaned back in a wicker chair, and to a sympathetic observation his attitude and absent skyward gaze might have expressed a contemplative bafflement. However, this was not Muriel’s interpretation, for she wrote:

“Across the street, ignoble in content, Under a dusty walnut tree, A young man flanneled sits, And dreams his petty burgher dreams Of burghers’ petty offices. He’s nothing. So, lonely in the savourless place, I find No comrade for my white, white light, No single soul that understands, Or glimpses just, my meanings.”

Again the lonely girl looked out of the window, but this time with the sharpest annoyance, and wished herself even lonelier and more remote than her poem declared. Half a dozen lively children, including her own fat little brother Robert, had begun to play in the yard across the street, where the young man flanneled sat; and sometimes one of them came to hide behind his chair, though Renfrew was so immersed in his petty burgher dreams that he did not appear to know it. The shouting of the children interfered with composition, however, and while the poetess struggled on, the interference grew so poignant that it became actually a part of the texture of her poem:

“Oh, I am lonely in this world of noises, This world of piercing senseless outcries, I hate it so! I hear the shrill, Malignant yowls of children, Growing up like all the rest Without the power of thinking. Oh, noises how accursed——”

Here her poem came to an end forever—that is to say, it had no end, was never completed, remained a fragment. Muriel jumped up, and the expressions she employed were appropriate for a maddened poet’s use, though they befitted not a maiden’s. The accursed noises across the street had become unbearable; they roused Renfrew from his petty dreams, and he straightened up in his chair to see what was going on.

“Here, here!” he said. “This isn’t the Fourth of July. Quiet down a little, will you?”

Four boys, Masters Robert Eliot, Laurence Coy, Thomas Kimball and Freddie Mears, an eight-year-old cousin of Renfrew’s, were advancing upon him, each evidently operating an imaginary machine-gun. “Bang! Bang! Bang! Bangity, Bangity, Bang! _Bang!_” they shouted with the utmost violence of their lungs.

“Stop it!” Renfrew commanded, and as the machine-guns seemed to be levelled straight at himself, he added: “Let me alone. I haven’t done anything to you. What do you want to kill _me_ for?”

He mistook their meaning, as he discovered immediately. “_Ping! Ping! Ping!_” a shrill voice cried out from the ground just behind his chair—another machine-gun, or else an “ottomatick.”

“_Pingity, pingity, ping. Ur-r-r-r-r-ping!_”

The voice was that of Renfrew’s nine-year-old sister Daisy; and looking round and down, he discovered her crouching low behind his chair, firing continuously. Renfrew perceived that he was a fortification of some sort; for although the presence of a grown person has naturally a stultifying effect upon children, they readily forget him if he remains in his own sphere; then he becomes but part of their landscape; they will use him as a castle, or perhaps as a distant Indian. Renfrew was now a log cabin.

“_Ping! Ping! Pingety ur-r-r-r-r-ping!_” Daisy shrieked from behind him. “You’re all dead! Lay down!”

“You’re dead yourself,” Robert Eliot retorted. “I guess all us four filled you fuller o’ wounds than you did us, didn’t we? Lay down yourself!”

“I won’t!” And Daisy, rising, began to argue the question vehemently. “I saw you all the time when you came around the house. I shot you first, didn’t I? Wasn’t I sayin’ ‘_Ping_,’ before ever any one of you said ‘Bang?’”

“No, you wasn’t,” Laurence Coy hotly replied. “Why, if we’d of had real guns, they wouldn’t be enough left o’ you to bury in a hen’s nest.”

“They would, too!” Daisy shouted. “If I’d had a real gun, they wouldn’t be enough left of you to bury in _half_ a hen’s nest!”

“They would, too!” Laurence retorted, and his comrades in arms loudly echoed him. “They would, too!” they shouted.

“You’re _dead_!” Daisy insisted. “You got to all four lay down. You got to!”

But upon this they raised such a chorus of jeering that she stamped her foot. “You _got_ to!” she cried.

“Listen!” said Laurence. “Listen here! I killed you myself, first thing when we came around the house. I leave it to Elsie Threamer.”

He referred to the one other little girl who was present, though she took no part in these military encounters and seemed, in fact, to disapprove of them. Fastidiously remaining at a distance from the belligerents, she sat alone upon the steps of the large front porch—a dainty little figure in strong contrast to the strident Daisy. Elsie was in smooth and unspotted white linen; and Daisy, too, had been in smooth and unspotted white linen—for a few minutes—but this one point of resemblance was now lost. Elsie was a beautiful child, whereas even the fonder of Daisy’s two grandmothers had never gone so far as to say that Daisy was a beauty. Elsie was known for her sweet disposition, though some people thought that living next door to Daisy was injuring it. When Elsie came into a room where grown people were, they looked pleased; when Daisy came into a room where grown people were, they looked at their watches.

“Yes,” said Robert Eliot, confirming Master Coy’s choice of an umpire. “_I_ leave it to Elsie. Whoever Elsie says is dead, why, they got to _be_ dead.”

“Leave it to Elsie,” the other boys agreed. “Daisy’s dead, isn’t she, Elsie?”

“I am _not_!” Daisy cried. “I don’t care what Elsie says. I killed every last one of you, and if you don’t lay down, I’ll make you.”

“You will?” the bulky Robert inquired. “How you goin’ to make us?”

“I’ll _frow_ you down,” said the determined Daisy; and she added vindictively: “Then I’ll walk all over you!”

The enemy received this with unanimous hootings. “Yes, you will!” Laurence Coy boasted satirically. “Come on and try it if you don’t know any better!” And he concluded darkly: “Why, you wouldn’t live a minute!”

“Anyway,” Daisy insisted, “I won’t leave it to Elsie, whether I’m dead or not.”

“You got to,” said Laurence, and walking toward Elsie, he pointed to Daisy, and spoke with some deference. “Tell her she’s dead, Elsie.”

Elsie shook her head. “I doe’ care ’nything about it,” she said coldly. “I doe’ care whether she’s dead or whether she isn’t.”

“But she didn’t kill _us_, did she, Elsie?” Laurence urged her. “Our side’s alive, isn’t it, Elsie?”

“I doe’ care whether you are or whether you’re not,” the cold and impartial Miss Threamer returned. “I doe’ care ’nything about it which you are.”

“I am _not_ dead!” Daisy shouted, jumping up and down as she pranced toward the steps where sat the indifferent judge. “I doe’ care if Elsie says I’m dead a thousan’ times, I guess I got my rights, haven’t I?”

“No, you haven’t,” Robert Eliot informed her harshly.

“I have, too!” she cried. “I have, too, got my rights.”

“You haven’t, either,” Laurence said. “You haven’t got any rights. Whatever Elsie says is goin’ to be the rights.”

Daisy strained her voice to its utmost limits: “I got my RIGHTS!” she bawled.

They crowded about Elsie, arguing, jeering, gesticulating, a shrill and active little mob; meanwhile Elsie, seated somewhat above them, rested her chin on her clean little hand, and looked out over their heads with large, far-away eyes that seemed to take no account of them and their sordid bickerings. And Renfrew, marking how aloof from them she seemed, was conscious of a vague resemblance; Elsie, like Muriel, seemed to dwell above the common herd.

Then, as she watched the clamorous group, he noticed that whenever Laurence Coy appealed to Elsie, his voice, though loud, betrayed a certain breathlessness, while frequently after speaking to her he opened his mouth and took in a little air, which he then swallowed with some difficulty, his neck becoming obviously uneasy. Indeed, this symptom was so pronounced that Renfrew, observing it with great interest, felt that there was something reminiscent about it—that is, it reminded him of something; he could not think just what. But he began to feel that Laurence perceived that Elsie was on a higher plane.

Elsie seemed to think so herself. “I doe’ care ’nything about it,” remained her unaltered verdict. “I doe’ care a thing which is dead or which isn’t.”

“Well, then,” said Laurence Coy, “we might as well play somep’m else.”

“All right,” Daisy agreed. “Le’s play I’m a grea’ big Injun woyer, an’ all the rest of you are children I got to come an’ scalp.”

Her proposal met with no general favour—with no favour at all, in fact. “For heaven’s sakes!” Thomas Kimball said. “I’d like to know what you take us for!” And in this scornful view he was warmly seconded by all his fellows.