Part 4

"Am I so difficult to please?" he asked sententiously. He answered the question himself. "Yes, I admit that I am." His look of admiration, which Peggy divined was constitutional with him on such occasions, was best to be met by diversion.

"I shall never be able to play golf as Lydia Maxwell does, and I've been at it twice as long. She has only played this spring, and Dobson says that she has a better idea of the game than any other woman. It's just knack with her, for her balls go farther than mine and yet she makes scarcely an exertion. You couldn't help admire her in all sorts of ways. It has been a dreadfully quiet season for her, though, for when her baby was six weeks old and she had sent out cards for two musical parties in their new town house, her husband's mother, old Mrs. Maxwell, died suddenly, and she had to go into mourning. So they went to Southern California for February and March, and moved down here as soon as they returned. She took lessons in golf at Los Angeles, and she beat me four up the first time we played, even though I supposed I could give her half a stroke."

While he listened to this monologue, Spencer followed the progress of the subject of it. She was playing with pretty Mrs. Baxter, but, though her opponent was an ordinarily graceful woman, there was a deft harmony in her movements which made Mrs. Baxter appear an unfinished person by comparison.

"They say the real secret is that she has an artistic temperament." The speech was Peggy's by way of reading his thoughts and providing a condensed and comprehensive key.

"And her husband--what is he like? You know he has come to the surface during my absence."

"He hasn't it at all--I mean an artistic temperament. But he's an awfully good sort--awfully; a true sport, and kind as can be." Peggy's vocabulary of enthusiasm, though fundamentally native, sometimes made reprisals on the kindred jargon of Great Britain.

"I see. And you infer that I have an artistic temperament?" A tendency toward challenging unexpectedness was one of Spencer's prime manifestations with women.

Peggy looked embarrassed. She had not bargained for such an unequivocal piece of teasing. She put up her hand to her head to secure her escaping comb. "I don't know you very well, of course, but I had supposed so. Yet I'm not clever, and I dote on Lydia," she added archly.

Harry Spencer did not have to go out of his way for an opportunity to satisfy his curiosity by personal acquaintance with Mrs. Herbert Maxwell. When he and his fair partner had finished the last hole and approached the piazza of the new club-house, they found her sitting there--one of a group of both sexes waiting for luncheon. Peggy, radiant and prodigal of superlatives, proclaimed to one after another that her game had come back. Wasn't it perfectly glorious?--the loveliest thing which had ever happened. And Mr. Spencer had detected at once what was wrong. "Just think of it, I was pressing and took my eye off the ball," she kept reiterating, "and I never knew it. Wasn't it dear of him?"

One of the most characteristic features of golf is that it is not an altruistic pastime. Everyone is feverishly absorbed by the state of his own game, and does not care at heart a picayune for his neighbor's. At the moment of Peggy's vociferous advent the assembled company were talking in pairs, and each member of each pair was endeavoring to excite the interest of his or her partner in the dialogue by glowing or dejected narration of why his or her score was lower or higher than the speaker's average. In some cases both were talking at once and neither listened. Oftener, perhaps, each had asserted an innings, and the strongest or most persistent lungs held the mastery. Miss Marbury, who under the tutelage of Dobson had done the longest hole in 12 and the eighteen holes in 132--five better than ever before--was bubbling over with ecstasy and soliciting congratulations. Douglas Hale, who had failed by one stroke to surpass his previous record of 82, was telling hoarsely and pathetically to everyone whom he could buttonhole how it happened.

"At the fourteenth hole I was on the green in two and took seven for the hole. Seven! Just think of that, seven! Five strokes on the green." As he uttered the words with excruciating precision, he would hold up the five fingers of his hand and shake them at his auditor. It was an experience which would last him all day and as far into the evening as he could find new listeners, especially if he could endeavor to take the edge off his disappointment by Scotch and soda.

Consequently, though everybody heard that Miss Peggy Blake had recovered her game, and her breezy invasion caused a stir, the fact that she had done so was of interest only because of the means by which this had been brought to pass. It was Harry Spencer, not she, who became the cynosure of numerous feminine eyes. If he had put Peggy onto her game, why not them onto theirs? Peggy, mistaking the reason for the pause in the general chatter for interest in her improvement, proceeded to rehearse gleefully the details of her triumph for the benefit of the company. But Douglas Hale, in no mood to be side-tracked by any such interruption, stepped forward, and hooking his arm in Harry Spencer's, led him apart with a mysterious "A word with you, old man."

Having thus enforced an audience, he held forth in the low tone appropriate to an interesting confidence. "Just now I was 58 at the end of the thirteenth hole, and was on the green of the fourteenth in two, and I took seven for the hole. Five puts on the green! Think of that, five!" he whispered hoarsely, and shook his five fingers in Harry's face. "Seven for the hole. And I finished in 82. Tied my own record. Wasn't that the meanest streak of luck a man ever had? Five puts, and two of them rimmed the cup."

His victim listened indulgently. The firm grip on his arm precluded escape.

"You must learn to put, my dear fellow."

"That's the most sickening part of it. I made every other put. Let me tell you--you remember the slope of the fourteenth green? Well, I----"

Realizing what he was in for, Harry took advantage of a momentary pause on the part of his torturer for the purpose of lighting a cigarette. His observing eyes had noticed that Mrs. Maxwell was standing apart from the other women who were within range of Miss Blake's jubilant reiteration. He wrenched himself free from Douglas's clutch.

"It was a case of downright hard luck, and now, in return for my heart-felt sympathy and for listening to your tale of woe, introduce me to Mrs. Herbert Maxwell."

Puffing at his half-lighted cigarette, Douglas Hale reached out to recover his lost grip. "Wait a minute. You haven't heard half. I will show you just how it happened."

Spencer intercepted the reaching fingers and grabbed the offender's wrist, and said, with jocund firmness, "I don't care a tinker's dam how it happened, Douglas, and I tell you you can't put. Introduce me to Mrs. Maxwell."

This quip caused the egotist to draw himself up stiffly. He was proof against hints and ordinary recalcitration, but such an unmistakable rebuff was not to be ignored; that is, he could not with proper self-respect continue the harangue on which he was bent.

"Of course if you don't care to hear how it happened, I won't tell you." So saying, Douglas suffered himself to be conveyed the necessary few steps, and performed the ceremony of introduction.

Lydia let her eyes rest with keen but interested scrutiny on this new-comer. He was a boon at the moment, for she had taken the gauge of everybody at Westfield, and was conscious that neither her heart nor her brain was satisfied. She craved novelty and true aesthetic appreciation. Did anyone really understand her? Not even Fannie Cole, who came the nearest to divining her hatred of the commonplace and her dread of being bored. But Fannie, though discerning, chose to remain a slave to the canons of conformity. That morning, in her looking-glass she had asked herself the question, "Why did I ever marry Herbert Maxwell?" But she had asked it with no malice aforethought, merely as one who, with leisure to take account of stock, foots up his assets and puts the question, "Am I solvent?" The interrogation was simply searching and contemplative. The answer had been prompt, and in a measure assuring. "Because it gave me everything I need." Yet, somehow, there remained a cloud upon her spirit. Was this all? Did life offer nothing further?

"We make a fuss and circumstance about our sports," she said.

"They do creak."

It was agreeable to be comprehended so promptly. "It isn't sport for sport's sake, but for the sake of the cups and because it's the thing."

"And above all to beat the other fellow. That's the national creed. It's so in everything--competition. We are brought up from childhood to consider that winning is the thing which counts. We must win at any cost at foot-ball or trade, in affairs or in love."

She made one of her little pauses. Decidedly he was a kindred spirit and to be cultivated. "I am an exotic then."

"How so?"

"Competition--the national creed--does not interest me."

"Because you win so easily. I watched you play this morning. You will have no rival of your own sex here."

She ignored the tribute; she knew that already; it was the thesis which interested her.

"It bores me--winning, I mean. Golf, for the time being, is a delight."

He gave her a pirate glance, as though to search her soul, and uttered one of his bold sallies:

"That is, your doll is stuffed with----"

She checked him, shaking her head. "Oh, no. That is, I think not. I have never cut her open. I had in mind something quite different." Her dainty face grew pensive as she sought the exact phrase to interpret her psychology. "I have never had to struggle for anything. It has always come to me."

"Exactly." His note of emphasis reminded her that her words were, after all, merely an indirect echo of his diagnosis. "But your time is sure to come," he asserted confidently.

The smile of incredulity which curved her lips betrayed entertainment also. "In what field?" she inquired.

Spencer shrugged his shoulders. "I am a student of character, not a soothsayer."

"And then?" she queried.

"You will be like the rest of us--only more so. You could not bear to lose at any cost."

What might have seemed effrontery in some men was but a piquant challenge in his mouth, so speciously was it uttered. Lydia was not unaccustomed to men whose current coin was sardonic sallies, as witness the veteran Gerald Marcy. But this was something different. Her soul had been suddenly pitchforked by a professor of anatomy and held up under her nose with the caveat that she was ignorant of the mainsprings of her own behavior. It was impudence, but novel, and she forgave it with the reflection that he would live to eat his gratuitous deductions, which would be the neatest form of vengeance.

V

Before many weeks had elapsed it began to be whispered at Westfield that Harry Spencer and Mrs. Herbert Maxwell were seeing more or less of each other. They appeared together not infrequently on the golf links; it was known that he was giving her lessons at her own house in bridge whist, the new game of cards; they had been met walking in the lanes; and--most significant item, which caused the colony to prick up its ears and ask, "What does this mean?"--two youthful anglers had encountered them strolling in the lonely woods skirting distant Duck Pond. This last discovery, which was early in September, led to the conclusion that, under cover of her mourning, Lydia must have been seeing more of him than anyone had imagined. Yet, even then, though alert brains indulged in knowing innuendoes, Mrs. Cole's epigrammatic estimate of the matter was generally accepted as sound:

"A woman in mourning for her mother-in-law requires diversion."

It seemed probable that Lydia was amusing herself, and that Harry Spencer was playing the tame cat for their mutual edification. The possibility that he had been caught at last and that she was luring him on that she might lead him like a bear with a ring through his nose, and thus avenge her sex for his past indifference, was regarded as unlikely but delightful. That Lydia was enamored of her admirer, and that they both cared, was not seriously entertained until many circumstances seemed to point to such a deduction. Westfield was not wholly without experience in intimacies between husbands or wives and a third party. But only rarely had there been fire as well as smoke in these cases. And even then there had never been up to this time an open scandal. Matters had been patched up or the veil of diplomatic convention had been drawn so skilfully over them that most people were left in the dark as to the real truth. Almost invariably the intimacies in question reminded one of the antics of horses with too high action who had all the show but little of the quality of runaways; and the preferences manifested were not always inconsistent with conjugal devotion. Consequently, everyone took for granted that this was only another "fake" instance of family disarrangement, entered on to pass the time and to provide that appearance of evil which the American woman seems to find a satisfying substitute for the real article. As Mrs. Cole once remarked in defending the propensity to Gerald Marcy, if one's vanity is flattered, why should one go farther?

The buzz of curiosity was stimulated during the ensuing autumn by a variety of fresh and compromising rumors. Consequently, when at a golfing luncheon party given at the club by Mrs. Gordon Wallace in October, Mrs. Baxter, whose blue eyes always suggested innocence, asked in her demure way what the latest news was from "The Knoll," every tongue had something new to impart. The most sensational as well as the latest piece of information was provided by Mrs. Cunningham, who repeated it with the air of one whose faith had at last received a serious shock.

"She sat with him on the piazza at 'The Knoll' until three o'clock night before last. Her husband came home at eleven and requested her to go to bed, but there they stayed without him. I call that pretty bad, even if she is Lydia. I wonder how long Herbert Maxwell will permit this sort of thing to go on. Even the worm will turn."

There was an eloquent silence, which was broken by a repetition of Mrs. Cole's whitewashing epigram as to Lydia's need of diversion. Its cleverness and value as a generalization caused a ripple of amusement, but it fell flat as a specific. Old Mrs. Maxwell had been dead many months, yet matters were more disconcerting than ever. Stout Miss Marbury's question was regarded as much more to the point:

"Who saw them, Mrs. Cunningham?"

May Cunningham would have preferred to remain silent on this score, but she perceived that the authenticity of her story was dependent on direct testimony. It was a luncheon of eight. She glanced around the table in an appealing manner as much as to say, "This really is not to be spoken of," and said laconically, "There was another couple present." Then, as though she feared on second thought that the wrong persons might be fixed on, she continued: "Neither of them were married. They are supposed to be engaged, and Lydia acted as their chaperone on the piazza while they took a moonlight ride together."

"Who can they have been?" murmured some one sweetly, and there was a general giggle.

"You wormed it out of me," said Mrs. Cunningham doggedly. "You demanded my credentials. But it doesn't matter about those two, of course, for they're in love."

"How about the others?" ventured Mrs. Baxter.

"Truly, Rachel, you shock me," answered Mrs. Cunningham sternly. "It's no joking matter. It's a very serious situation for this colony, in my opinion. People who don't know us do not think any too well of us already because some of us smoke cigarettes and go in for hunting and an open-air life instead of trying to reform somebody. But this will give the gossips a real handle. Besides, it's disreputable."

"But I really wished to know," murmured Mrs. Baxter. "Does either of them care? And if so, which?"

"My own belief," interjected Mrs. Cole, "as I said just now, is that there's nothing in it--nothing serious. Lydia is simply catering to her ├Žsthetic side, and everyone knows Harry Spencer. It seems to me personally that she has gone too far, but that is a question of taste, and, provided her husband doesn't complain, why need we?" Thereupon she popped into her mouth a luscious-looking coffee cream confection and munched it ruminantly.

"It has become a question of morals," asserted Mrs. Cunningham. "If their relations are what we don't believe them to be, it's a disgrace to Westfield. If they are simply amusing themselves, it's heartless, and I know what I would do if I were Herbert Maxwell."

"So do I," exclaimed Mrs. Reynolds, a spirited young matron with the breath of life in her nostrils, yet, as someone once remarked of her, notoriously devoted to her lord and master.

"Just what my husband said," added Mrs. Miller, a bride of a year's standing, which, considering nothing whatever had been said, provoked a smile and brought a blush to the countenance of the speaker, which deepened as Mrs. Baxter with her accustomed innocence asked:

"What would you do?"

"Pick out the most seductive-looking woman I could set my eyes on, Rachel dear, and"--blurted out Mrs. Reynolds pungently. As she paused an instant seeking her phrase, Mrs. Cunningham interjected:

"Sh! We understand. That might bring her to her senses."

"But Herbert Maxwell never would," said Mrs. Cole, reaching for another sweetmeat.

"I'm not so sure about that," retorted Mrs. Cunningham. "He's faithful as a mastiff, but goad him too far and he may prove to be a slumbering lion, in my opinion."

"That wouldn't suit Lydia at all," responded Mrs. Cole. The thesis interested her. "She takes for granted, I presume, his unswerving fidelity. Besides, he would consider it morally wrong. I shall be very much surprised, my dear, if you are not mistaken."

"I'm not a married woman," suggested Miss Marbury, "but I think he ought to put a stop in some way or other to the present condition of things, and that it is his fault if he doesn't."

A murmur of acquiescence showed that this was the general sentiment, at which point the discussion of the topic was brought to a close by the hostess's rising from the table--that is, discussion by the party as a whole. After they had repaired to the general sitting-room--that neutral apartment in the club which was appropriated to the use of both sexes--the subject still claimed the attention of the groups into which the company subdivided itself. Here Mrs. Baxter found an opportunity to repeat her inquiry whether either, neither, or both cared, which really was the most interesting uncertainty of the situation, and one which elicited a variety of opinion. Some, like Mrs. Cole, were still incredulous, or chose to be, that either of them was in earnest. But several of the more knowing women wagged their heads in concert with Mrs. Cunningham, who, seated where her vision could rest on the full-length portrait of her husband swathed in pink as the first Master of the Westfield Hounds--one of the new decorative features--repeated data to the effect that Herbert Maxwell was looking glum and was drinking a little--much more than ever before in his life.

"Poor fellow!" sighed Miss Marbury, and she added, as though in self-congratulatory monologue, that there were some compensations in being single.

"Nothing of the kind; you know nothing about it," said Mrs. Cunningham tartly. She did not choose to hear the institution of holy matrimony traduced by a mere spinster; moreover, her nerves were on edge because of her solicitude lest the most appalling possibility of all were true--that Lydia really cared. For, granting the hypothesis, what might not Lydia do? What would Lydia do? And as yet, though conjecture ran riot and all Westfield was holding its breath, no one could speak with authority as to what the truth was. Nevertheless, Mrs. Cunningham, as an observer, was disposed to take a pessimistic view as to what the future had in store for the colony, the good repute of which was precious to her. On the other hand, many of the younger spirits among the women were inclined to regard the mother of the hunt as a croaker, and as they chatted apart from her on this occasion they cited her late opposition to the recent innovations at the club as typical of her mental attitude.

"Yet to-day, if a vote were taken whether we should go back to the old primitive order of things," added Mrs. Miller, "she would be one of the most strenuous defenders of the extra space and improved service which we now enjoy. She can't keep her eyes off that portrait of her husband. Look at her now."

The stricture, so far as it related to Mrs. Cunningham's change of front regarding the alterations, was just. Yet her frank acceptance and enjoyment of the more decorative rooms and ampler creature-comforts, even though they wore a radiance reflected from her husband's full-length figure, revealed a broad and accommodating mind. There are some persons who will continue to glorify the superseded past even in the face of a manifestly more charming present. These are the real old fogies, and there is no help for us, or them, but to ignore them. But Mrs. Cunningham was of the sort which, though conservative, is ready to be convinced even against its will; and, having been convinced, she was able to draw her husband after her. A week's occupation of the new quarters having made clear to her that, though more luxurious, they were vastly more convenient, she had sighed and given in. Now there were no two more resolute defenders of the results of the radical policy than she and Andrew. Nevertheless she drew the line there, and still, suspicious of what others defined as the march of progress, she was prepared like a faithful sentinel to challenge developments which aroused her distrust. Because the new club-house was a success, and the inroad of multi-millionnaires had not been so subversive of the best interests of the colony as she had feared, there was no occasion to relax her vigilance. Thus she argued, and hence her genuine and somewhat foreboding solicitude as to Lydia's behavior.

But though Harry Spencer continued to dog the footsteps of Mrs. Maxwell, so that he appeared in her society on all occasions, and people wondered more and more how the husband could permit this triangular household to continue without open demur, there were no new developments during the late autumn and winter. Rumors of every description were rife, but no one of the three interested parties deigned to provide a solution of the enigma. Maxwell's demeanor on the surface was so far unruffled that certain observers continued to maintain that his wife's state of mind was entirely platonic; in other words, that he trusted Lydia, and, though he might have preferred more of her society, was willing she should amuse herself in her own way--which was not apt to be the conventional way. And if he did not object, why should anyone else, especially as the Maxwells were now in their town house and local censorship by Westfield was suspended? But the majority shook their heads, and repeated that though Maxwell held his peace, he was out of sorts and still drinking more than his wont. Then, just as the community was getting a little weary of the whole subject because nothing did happen, the breaking out of the war with Spain drove it out of everyone's mind.