Chapter 11

Lorraine had put it once again in her happy way only a few weeks previous; we were “saving up,” she said--and not meaning at all our poor scant dollars and cents, though we've also kept hold of some of THEM--for an exercise of strength and a show of character that would make us of a sudden some unmistakable sign. We should just meet it rounding a corner as with the rush of an automobile--a chariot of fire that would stop but long enough to take us in, when we should know it immediately for the vehicle of our fate. That conviction had somehow been with us, and I had really heard our hour begin to strike on Peg's coming back to us from her co-educative adventure so preposterously “engaged.” I didn't believe in it, in such a manner of becoming so, one little bit, and I took on myself to hate the same; though that indeed seemed the last thing to trouble any one else. Her turning up in such a fashion with the whole thing settled before Father or Mother or Maria or any of us had so much as heard of the young man, much less seen the tip of his nose, had too much in common, for my taste, with the rude betrothals of the people, with some maid-servant's announcement to her employer that she has exchanged vows with the butcher-boy.

I was indignant, quite artlessly indignant I fear, with the college authorities, barbarously irresponsible, as it struck me; for when I broke out about them to poor Mother she surprised me (though I confess she had sometimes surprised me before), by her deep fatalism. “Oh, I suppose they don't pretend not to take their students at the young people's own risk: they can scarcely pretend to control their affections!” she wonderfully said; she seemed almost shocked, moreover, that I could impute either to Father or to herself any disposition to control Peggy's. It was one of the few occasions of my life on which I've suffered irritation from poor Mother; and yet I'm now not sure, after all, that she wasn't again but at her old game (even then, for she has certainly been so since) of protecting poor Father, by feigning a like flaccidity, from the full appearance, not to say the full dishonor, of his failure ever to meet a domestic responsibility. It came over me that there would be absolutely nobody to meet this one, and my own peculiar chance glimmered upon me therefore on the spot. I can't retrace steps and stages; suffice it that my opportunity developed and broadened, to my watching eyes, with each precipitated consequence of the wretched youth's arrival.

He proved, without delay, an infant in arms; an infant, either, according to circumstances, crowing and kicking and clamoring for sustenance, or wailing and choking and refusing even the bottle, to the point even, as I've just seen in New York, of imminent convulsions. The “arms” most appropriate to his case suddenly announced themselves, in fine, to our general consternation, as Eliza's: but it was at this unnatural vision that my heart indeed leaped up. I was beforehand even with Lorraine; she was still gaping while, in three bold strokes, I sketched to her our campaign. “I take command--the others are flat on their backs. I save little pathetic Peg, even in spite of herself; though her just resentment is really much greater than she dares, poor mite, recognize (amazing scruple!). By which I mean I guard her against a possible relapse. I save poor Mother--that is I rid her of the deadly Eliza--forever and a day! Despised, rejected, misunderstood, I nevertheless intervene, in its hour of dire need, as the good genius of the family; and you, dear little quaint thing, I take advantage of the precious psychological moment to whisk YOU off to Europe. We'll take Peg with us for a year's true culture; she wants a year's true culture pretty badly, but she doesn't, as it turns out, want Mr. Goward a 'speck.' And I'll do it all in my own way, before they can recover breath; they'll recover it--if we but give them time--to bless our name; but by that moment we shall have struck for freedom!”

Well, then, my own way--it was “given me,” as Lorraine says--was, taking the night express, without a word to any one but Peg, whom it was charming, at the supreme hour, to feel glimmeringly, all-wonderingly, with us: my own way, I say, was to go, the next morning, as soon as I had breakfasted, to the address Lorraine had been able, by an immense piece of luck, to suggest to me as a possible clue to Eliza's whereabouts. “She'll either be with her friends the Chataways, in East Seventy-third Street--she's always swaggering about the Chataways, who by her account are tremendous 'smarts,' as she has told Lorraine the right term is in London, leading a life that is a burden to them without her; or else they'll know where she is. That's at least what I HOPE!” said my wife with infinite feminine subtlety. The Chataways as a subject of swagger presented themselves, even to my rustic vision, oddly; I may be mistaken about New York “values,” but the grandeur of this connection was brought home to me neither by the high lopsided stoop of its very, very East Side setting, nor by the appearance of a terrible massive lady who came to the door while I was in quite unproductive parley with an unmistakably, a hopelessly mystified menial, an outlandish young woman with a face of dark despair and an intelligence closed to any mere indigenous appeal. I was to learn later in the day that she's a Macedonian Christian whom the Chataways harbor against the cruel Turk in return for domestic service; a romantic item that Eliza named to me in rueful correction of the absence of several indeed that are apparently prosaic enough.

The powder on the massive lady's face indeed transcended, I rather thought, the bounds of prose, did much to refer her to the realm of fantasy, some fairy-land forlorn; an effect the more marked as the wrapper she appeared hastily to have caught up, and which was somehow both voluminous and tense (flowing like a cataract in some places, yet in others exposing, or at least denning, the ample bed of the stream) reminded me of the big cloth spread in a room when any mess is to be made. She apologized when I said I had come to inquire for Miss Talbert--mentioned (with play of a wonderfully fine fat hand) that she herself was “just being manicured in the parlor”; but was evidently surprised at my asking about Eliza, which plunged her into the question--it suffused her extravagant blondness with a troubled light, struggling there like a sunrise over snow--of whether she had better, confessing to ignorance, relieve her curiosity or, pretending to knowledge, baffle mine. But mine of course carried the day, for mine showed it could wait, while hers couldn't; the final superiority of women to men being in fact, I think, that we are more PATIENTLY curious.

“Why, is she in the city?”

“If she isn't, dear madam,” I replied, “she ought to be. She left Eastridge last evening for parts unknown, and should have got here by midnight.” Oh, how glad I was to let them both in as far as I possibly could! And clearly now I had let Mrs. Chataway, if such she was, in very far indeed.

She stared, but then airily considered. “Oh, well--I guess she's somewheres.”

“I guess she is!” I replied.

“She hasn't got here yet--she has so many friends in the city. But she always wants US, and when she does come--!” With which my friend, now so far relieved and agreeably smiling, rubbed together conspicuously the pair of plump subjects of her “cure.”

“You feel then,” I inquired, “that she will come?”

“Oh, I guess she'll be round this afternoon. We wouldn't forgive her--!”

“Ah, I'm afraid we MUST forgive her!” I was careful to declare. “But I'll come back on the chance.”

“Any message then?”

“Yes, please say her nephew from Eastridge--!”

“Oh, her nephew--!”

“Her nephew. She'll understand. I'll come back,” I repeated. “But I've got to find her!”

And, as in the fever of my need, I turned and sped away.

I roamed, I quite careered about, in those uptown streets, but instinctively and confidently westward. I felt, I don't know why, miraculously sure of some favoring chance and as if I were floating in the current of success. I was on the way to our reward, I was positively on the way to Paris, and New York itself, vast and glittering and roaring, much noisier even than the Works at their noisiest, but with its old rich thrill of the Art League days again in the air, was already almost Paris for me--so that when I at last fidgeted into the Park, where you get so beautifully away from the town, it was surely the next thing to Europe, and in fact HAD to be, since it's the very antithesis of Eastridge. I regularly revelled in that sense that Eliza couldn't have done a better thing for us than just not be, that morning, where it was supremely advisable she should have been. If she had had two grains of sense she would have put in an appearance at the Chataways' with the lark, or at least with the manicure, who seems there almost as early stirring. Or rather, really, she would have reported herself as soon as their train, that of the “guilty couple,” got in; no matter how late in the evening. It was at any rate actually uplifting to realize that I had got thus, in three minutes, the pull of her in regard to her great New York friends. My eye, as Lorraine says, how she HAS, on all this ground of those people, been piling it on! If Maria, who has so bowed her head, gets any such glimpse of what her aunt has been making her bow it to--well, I think I shall then entertain something of the human pity for Eliza, that I found myself, while I walked about, fairly entertaining for my sister.

What were they, what ARE they, the Chataways, anyhow? I don't even yet know, I confess; but now I don't want to--I don't care a hang, having no further use for them whatever. But on one of the Park benches, in the golden morning, the wonderment added, I remember, to my joy, for we hadn't, Lorraine and I, been the least bit overwhelmed about them: Lorraine only pretending a little, with her charming elfish art, that she occasionally was, in order to see how far Eliza would go. Well, that brilliant woman HAD gone pretty far for us, truly, if, after all, they were only in the manicure line. She was a-doing of it, as Lorraine says, my massive lady was, in the “parlor” where I don't suppose it's usually done; and aren't there such places, precisely, AS Manicure Parlors, where they do nothing else, or at least are supposed to? Oh, I do hope, for the perfection of it, that this may be what Eliza has kept from us! Otherwise, by all the gods, it's just a boarding-house: there was exactly the smell in the hall, THE boarding-house smell, that pervaded my old greasy haunt of the League days: that boiled atmosphere that seems to belong at once, confusedly, to a domestic “wash” and to inferior food--as if the former were perhaps being prepared in the saucepan and the latter in the tubs.

There also came back to me, I recollect, that note of Mrs. Chataway's queer look at me on my saying I was Eliza's nephew--the droll effect of her making on her side a discovery about ME. Yes, she made it, and as against me, of course, against all of us, at sight of me; so that if Eliza has bragged at Eastridge about New York, she has at least bragged in New York about Eastridge. I didn't clearly, for Mrs. Chataway, come up to the brag--or perhaps rather didn't come down to it: since I dare say the poor lady's consternation meant simply that my aunt has confessed to me but as an unconsidered trifle, a gifted child at the most; or as young and handsome and dashing at the most, and not as--well, as what I am. Whatever I am, in any case, and however awkward a document as nephew to a girlish aunt, I believe I really tasted of the joy of life in its highest intensity when, at the end of twenty minutes of the Park, I suddenly saw my absurd presentiment of a miracle justified.

I could of course scarce believe my eyes when, at the turn of a quiet alley, pulling up to gape, I recognized in a young man brooding on a bench ten yards off the precious personality of Harry Goward! There he languished alone, our feebler fugitive, handed over to me by a mysterious fate and a well-nigh incredible hazard. There is certainly but one place in all New York where the stricken deer may weep--or even, for that matter, the hart ungalled play; the wonder of my coincidence shrank a little, that is, before the fact that when young ardor or young despair wishes to commune with immensity it can ONLY do so either in a hall bedroom or in just this corner, practically, where I pounced on my prey. To sit down, in short, you've GOT to sit there; there isn't another square inch of the whole place over which you haven't got, as everything shrieks at you, to step lively. Poor Goward, I could see at a glance, wanted very much to sit down--looked indeed very much as if he wanted never, NEVER again to get up.

I hovered there--I couldn't help it, a bit gloatingly--before I pounced; and yet even when he became aware of me, as he did in a minute, he didn't shift his position by an inch, but only took me and my dreadful meaning, with his wan stare, as a part of the strange burden of his fate. He didn't seem even surprised to speak of; he had waked up--premising his brief, bewildered delirium--to the sense that something NATURAL must happen, and even to the fond hope that something natural WOULD; and I was simply the form in which it was happening. I came nearer, I stood before him; and he kept up at me the oddest stare--which was plainly but the dumb yearning that I would explain, explain! He wanted everything told him--but every single thing; as if, after a tremendous fall, or some wild parabola through the air, the effect of a violent explosion under his feet, he had landed at a vast distance from his starting-point and required to know where he was. Well, the charming thing was that this affected me as giving the very sharpest point to the idea that, in asking myself how I should deal with him, I had already so vividly entertained.

VIII. THE MARRIED DAUGHTER, By Elizabeth Stuart Phelps

We start in life with the most preposterous of all human claims--that one should be understood. We get bravely over that after awhile; but not until the idea has been knocked out of us by the hardest. I used to worry a good deal, myself, because nobody--distinctly not one person--in our family understood me; that is, me in my relation to themselves; nothing else, of course, mattered so much. But that was before I was married. I think it was because Tom understood me from the very first eye-beam, that I loved him enough to marry him and learn to understand HIM. I always knew in my heart that he had the advantage of me in that beautiful art: I suppose one might call it the soul-art. At all events, it has been of the least possible consequence to me since I had Tom, whether any one else in the world understood me or not.

I suppose--in fact, I know--that it is this unfortunate affair of Peggy's which has brought up all that old soreness to the surface of me.

Nobody knows better than I that I have not been a popular member of this family. But nobody knows as well as I how hard I have tried to do my conscientious best by the whole of them, collectively and individually considered. An older sister, if she have any consciousness of responsibility at all, is, to my mind, not in an easy position. Her extra years give her an extra sense. One might call it a sixth sense of family anxiety which the younger children cannot share. She has, in a way, the intelligence and forethought of a mother without a mother's authority or privilege.

When father had that typhoid and could not sleep--dear father! in his normal condition he sleeps like a bag of corn-meal--who was there in all the house to keep those boys quiet? Nobody but me. When they organized a military company in our back yard directly under father's windows--two drums, a fish-horn, a jews-harp, a fife, and three tin pans--was there anybody but me to put a stop to it? It was on this occasion that the pet name Moolymaria, afterward corrupted into Messymaria, and finally evolved into Meddlymaria, became attached to me. To this day I do not like to think how many cries I had over it. Then when Charles Edward got into debt and nobody dared to tell father; and when Billy had the measles and there wasn't a throat in the house to read to him four hours a day except my unpopular throat; and when Charles Edward had that quarrel over a girl with a squash-colored dress and cerise hair-ribbons; or when Alice fell in love with an automobile, the chauffeur being incidentally thrown in, and took to riding around the country with him--who put a stop to it? Who was the only person in the family that COULD put a stop to it?

Then again--but what's the use? My very temperament I can see now (I didn't see it when I lived at home) is in itself an unpopular one in a family like ours. I forecast, I foresee, I provide, I plan--it is my “natur' to.” I can't go sprawling through life. I must know where I am to set my foot. Dear mother has no more sense of anxiety than a rice pudding, and father is as cool as one of his own ice-pitchers. We all know what Charles Edward is, and I didn't count grandmother and Aunt Elizabeth.

There has been my blunder. I ought to have counted Aunt Elizabeth. I ought to have fathomed her. It never occurred to me that she was deep enough to drop a plummet in. I, the burden-bearer, the caretaker, the worrier; I, who am opprobriously called “the manager” in this family--I have failed them at this critical point in their household history. I did not foresee, I did not forecast, I did not worry, I did not manage. It did not occur to me to manage after we had got Peggy safely graduated and engaged, and now this dreadful thing has gaped beneath us like the fissures at San Francisco or Kingston, and poor little Peggy has tumbled into it. A teacupful of “management” might have prevented it; an ounce of worry would have saved it all. I lacked that teacupful; I missed that ounce. The veriest popular optimist could have done no worse. I am smothered with my own stupidity. I have borne this humiliating condition of things as long as I can. I propose to go over to that house and take the helm in this emergency. I don't care whether I am popular or unpopular for it. But something has got to be done for Peggy, and I am going to do it.

I have been over and I have done it. I have taken the “management” of the whole thing--not even discouraged by this unfortunate word. I own I am rather raw to it. But the time has come when, though I bled beneath it, I must act as if I didn't. At all events I must ACT.... I have acted. I am going to New York by the early morning express--the 7.20. I would go to-night-in fact, I really ought to go to-night. But Tom has a supper “on” with some visitors to the Works. He won't be home till late, and I can't go without seeing Tom. It would hurt his feelings, and that is a thing no wife ought to do, and my kind of wife can't do.

I found the house in its usual gelatinous condition. There wasn't a back-bone in it, scarcely an ankle-joint to stand upon: plenty of crying, but no thinking; a mush of talk, but no decision. To cap the situation, Charles Edward has gone on to New York with a preposterous conviction that HE can clear it up.... CHARLES EDWARD! If there is a living member of the household--But never mind that. This circumstance was enough for me, that's all. It brought out all the determination in me, all the manager, if you choose to put it so.

I shall go to New York myself and take the whole thing in hand. If I needed anything to padlock my purpose those dozen words with Peggy would have turned the key upon it. When I found that she wasn't crying; when I got face to face with that soft, fine excitement in the eyes which a girl wears when she has a love-affair, not stagnant, but in action--I concluded at once that Peggy had her reservations and was keeping something from me. On pretence of wanting a doughnut I got her into the pantry and shut both doors.

“Peggy,” I said, “what has Charles Edward gone to New York for? Do you know?”

Peggy wound a big doughnut spinning around her engagement finger and made no reply.

“If it has anything to do with you and Harry Goward, you must tell me, Peggy. You must tell me instantly.”

Peggy put a doughnut on her wedding finger and observed, with pained perplexity, that it would not spin, but stuck.

“What is Charles Edward up to?” I persisted.

The opening rose-bud of Peggy's face took on a furtive expression, like that of certain pansies, or some orchids I have seen. “He is going to take me to Europe,” she admitted, removing both her doughnut rings.

“YOU! To EUROPE!”

“He and Lorraine. When this is blown by. They want to get me away.”

“Away from what? Away from Harry Goward?”

“Oh, I suppose so,” blubbered Peggy.

She now began, in a perfectly normal manner, to mop her eyes with her handkerchief.

“Do you want to be got away from Harry Goward?” I demanded.

“I never said I did,” sobbed Peggy. “I never said so, not one little bit. But oh, Maria! Moolymaria! You can't think how dreadful it is to be a girl, an engaged girl, and not know what to do!”

Then and there an active idea--one with bones in it--raced and overtook me, and I shot out: “Where is that letter?”

“Mother has it,” replied Peggy.

“Have you opened it?”

“No.”

“Has Aunt Elizabeth opened it?”

“Oh no!”

“Did Charlies Edward take it with him?”

“I don't think he did. I will go ask mother.”

“Go ask mother for that letter,” I commanded, “and bring it to me.”

Peggy gave me one mutinous look, but the instinct of a younger sister was in her and she obeyed me. She brought the letter. I have this precious document in my pocket. I asked her if she would trust me to find out to whom that letter was addressed. After some hesitation she replied that she would. I reminded her that she was the only person in the world who could give me this authority--which pleased her. I told her that I should accept it as a solemn trust, and do my highest and best with it for her sake.

“Peggy,” I said, “this is not altogether a pleasant job for me, but you are my little sister and I will take care of you. Kiss your old Meddlymaria, Peggy.” She took down her sopping handkerchief and lifted her warm, wet face. So I kissed Peggy. And I am going on the 7.20 morning train.

It is now ten o'clock. My suit-case is packed, my ticket is bought, but Tom has not come back, and the worst of it is he can't get back to-night. He telephoned between courses at his dinner that he had accepted an invitation to go home for the night with one of the men they are dining. It seems he is a “person of importance”--there is a big order behind the junket, and Tom has gone home with him to talk it over. The ridiculous thing about it is that I forget where he was going. Of course I could telephone to the hotel and find out, but men don't like telephoning wives--at least, my man doesn't. It makes it rather hard, going on this trip without kissing Tom good-bye. I had half made up my mind to throw the whole thing over, but Peggy is pretty young; she has a long life before her; there is a good deal at stake. So Tom and I kissed by electricity, and he said that it was all right, and to go ahead, and the other absurd thing about that is that Tom didn't ask me for my New York address, and I forgot to tell him. We are like two asteroids spinning through space, neither knowing the other's route or destination. In point of fact, I shall register at “The Sphinx,” that nice ladies' hotel where mere man is never admitted.