Books: The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne
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Kathleen Norris >> The Rich Mrs. Burgoyne
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"Well, education WOULD solve it then," concluded Mrs. Brown.
"I don't know." Mrs. Burgoyne answered, reflectively, "Book
education won't certainly. But example might, I believe example
would."
"You mean for people of a better class to go and live among them?"
suggested the doctor.
"No, but I mean for people of a better class to show them that what
they are striving for isn't vital, after all. I mean for us to so
order our lives that they will begin to value cleanliness, and
simplicity, and the comforts they can afford. You know, Mary Brown,"
said Mrs. Burgoyne, turning suddenly to the doctor's wife, with her
gay, characteristic vehemence, "it's all our fault, all the misery
and suffering and sin of it, everywhere!"
"Our fault! You and me!" cried Mrs. Brown, aghast.
"No, all the fault of women, I mean!" Mrs. Burgoyne laughed too as
Mrs. Brown settled back in her chair with a relieved sigh. "We
women," she went on vigorously, "have mismanaged every separate work
that was ever put into our hands! We ought to be ashamed to live. We
cumber--"
"Here!" said the doctor, smiling in lazy comfort over his pipe,
"that's heresy! I refuse to listen to it. My wife is a woman, my
mother, unless I am misinformed, was another--"
"Don't mind him!" said Mrs. Brown, "but go on! What have we all
done? We manage our houses, and dress our children, and feed our
husbands, it seems to me."
"Well, there's the big business of motherhood," began Mrs. Burgoyne,
"the holiest and highest thing God ever let a mortal do. We evade it
and ignore it to such an extent that the nation--and other nations--
grows actually alarmed, and men begin to frame laws to coax us back
to the bearing of children. Then, if we have them, we turn the
entire responsibility over to other people. A raw little foreigner
of some sort answers the first questions our boys and girls ask,
until they are old enough to be put under some nice, inexperienced
young girl just out of normal school, who has fifty or sixty of them
to manage, and of whose ideas upon the big questions of life we know
absolutely nothing. We say lightheartedly that 'girls always go
through a trying age,' and that we suppose boys 'have to come in
contact with things,' and we let it go at that! We 'suppose there
has always been vice, and always will be,' but we never stop to
think that we ourselves are setting the poor girls of the other
world such an example in the clothes we wear, and the pleasures we
take, that they will sell even themselves for pretty gowns and
theatre suppers. We regret sweat-shops, even while we patronize the
stores that support them, and we bemoan child-labor, although I
suppose the simplest thing in the world would be to find out where
the cotton goes that is worked by babies, and refuse to buy those
brands of cotton, and make our merchants tell us where they DO get
their supply! We have managed our household problem so badly that we
simply can't get help--"
"You CANNOT do your own work, with children," said Mrs. Brown
firmly.
"Of course you can't. But why is it that our nice young American
girls won't come into our homes? Why do we have to depend upon the
most ignorant and untrained of our foreign people? Our girls pour
into the factories, although our husbands don't have any trouble in
getting their brothers for office positions. There is always a line
of boys waiting for a possible job at five dollars a week."
"Because they can sleep at home," submitted the doctor.
"You know that, other things being equal, young people would much
rather not sleep at home," said Mrs. Burgoyne, "it's the migrating
age. They love the novelty of being away at night."
"Well, when a boy comes into my office," the doctor reasoned slowly,
"he knows that he has certain unimportant things to do, but he sees
me taking all the real responsibility, he knows that I work harder
than he does."
"Exactly," said Mrs. Burgoyne. "Men do their own work, with help. We
don't do ours. Not only that, but every improvement that comes to
ours comes from men. They invent our conveniences, they design our
stoves and arrange our sinks. Not because they know anything about
it, but because we're not interested."
"One would think you had done your own work for twenty years!" said
Mrs. Brown.
"I never did it," Mrs. Burgoyne answered smiling, "but I sometimes
wish I could. I sometimes envy those busy women who have small
houses, new babies, money cares--it must be glorious to rise to
fresh emergencies every hour of your life. A person like myself is
handicapped. I can't demonstrate that I believe what I say. Everyone
thinks me merely a little affected about it. If I were such a woman,
I'd glory in clipping my life of everything but the things I needed,
and living like one of my own children, as simply as a lot of
peasants!"
"And no one would ever be any the wiser," said Mrs. Brown.
"I don't know. Quiet little isolated lives have a funny way of
getting out into the light. There was that little peasant girl at
Domremy, for instance; there was that gentle saint who preached
poverty to the birds; there was Eugenie Guerin, and the Cure of Ars,
and the few obscure little English weavers--and there was the
President who split--"
"I thought we'd come to him!" chuckled the doctor.
"Well," Mrs. Burgoyne smiled, a little confused at having betrayed
hero-worship. "Well, and there was one more, the greatest of all,
who didn't found any asylums, or lead any crusade--" She paused.
"Surely," said the doctor, quietly. "Surely. I suppose that curing
the lame here, and the blind there, and giving the people their fill
of wine one day, and of bread and fishes the next, might be called
'dabbling' in these days. But the love that went with those things
is warming the world yet!"
"Well, but what can we DO?" demanded Mrs. Brown after a short
silence.
"That's for us to find out," said Mrs. Burgoyne, cheerfully.
"A correct diagnosis is half a cure," ended the doctor, hopefully.
CHAPTER IX
Barry was the last guest to reach Holly Hall on the evening of Mrs.
Burgoyne's first dinner-party, and came in to find the great painter
who was her guest the centre of a laughing and talking group in the
long drawing-room. Mrs. Apostleman, with an open book of
reproductions from Whistler on her broad, brocade lap, had the
armchair next to the guest of honor, and Barry's quick look for his
hostess discovered her on a low hassock at the painter's knee,
looking very young and fresh, in her white frock, with a LaMarque
rose at her belt and another in her dark hair. She greeted him very
gravely, almost timidly, and in the new self-consciousness that had
suddenly come to them both it was with difficulty that even the
commonplace words of greeting were accomplished, and it was with
evident relief that she turned from him to ask her guests to come
into the dining-room.
Warm daylight was still pouring into the drawing-room at seven
o'clock, and in the pleasant dining-room, too, there was no other
light. The windows here were wide open, and garden scents drifted in
from the recently watered flower-beds. The long table, simply set,
was ornamented only by low bowls of the lovely San Rafael roses.
Guided and stimulated by the hostess, the conversation ran in a gay,
unbroken stream, for the painter liked to talk, and Santa Paloma
enjoyed him. But under it all the women guests were aware of an
almost resentful amazement at the simplicity of the dinner. When,
after nine o'clock, the ladies went into the drawing-room and
settled about a snapping wood fire, Mrs. Lloyd could not resist
whispering to Mrs. Apostleman, "For a COMPANY dinner!" Mrs. Adams
was entirely absorbed in deciding just what position she would take
when Mrs. White alluded to the affair the next day; but Mrs. White
had come primed for special business this evening, and she took
immediate advantage of the absence of the men to speak to Mrs.
Burgoyne.
"As president of our little club," said she, when they were all
seated, "I am authorized to ask you if I may put your name up for
membership, Mrs. Burgoyne. We are all members here, and in this
quiet place our meetings are a real pleasure, and I hope an
education as well."
"Oh, really--!" Mrs. Burgoyne began, but the other went on serenely:
"I brought one of our yearly programs, we have just got them out,
and I'm going to leave it with you. I think Mr. White left it here
on the table. Yes; here it is. You see," she opened a dainty little
book and flattened it with a white, jeweled hand, "our work is all
laid out, up to the president's breakfast in March. I go out then,
and a week later we inaugurate the new president. Let me just run
over this for you, for I KNOW it will interest you. Now here,
Tuesdays. Tuesday is our regular meeting day. We have a program,
music, and books suggested for the week, reports, business, and one
good paper--the topics vary; here's 'Old Thanksgiving Customs,' in
November, then a debate, 'What is Friendship,' then 'Christmas
Spirit,' and then our regular Christmas Tree and Jinks. Once a
month, on Tuesday, we have some really fine speaker from the city,
and we often have fine singers, and so on. Then we have a monthly
reception for our visitors, and a supper; usually we just have tea
and bread-and-butter after the meetings. Then, first Monday,
Directors' Meeting; that doesn't matter. Every other Wednesday the
Literary Section meets, they are doing wonderful work; Miss Foster
has that; she makes it very interesting. 'What English Literature
Owes to Meredith,' 'Rossetti, the Man,'--you see I'm just skimming,
to give you some idea. Then the Dramatic Section, every other
Thursday; they give a play once a year; that's great fun! 'Ibsen--
Did he Understand Women?' 'Please Explain--Mr. Shaw?'--Mrs. Moore
makes that very amusing. Then alternate Thursdays the Civic and
Political Section--"
"Ah! What does that do?" said Mrs. Burgoyne.
"Why," said Mrs. White hesitating, "I haven't been--however, I think
they took up the sanitation of the schools; Miss Jewett, from
Sacramento, read a splendid paper about it. There's a committee to
look into that, and then last year that section planted a hundred
trees. And then there's parliamentary drill."
"Which we all need," said Mrs. Adams, and there was laughter.
"Then there's the Art Department once a month," resumed Mrs. White,
"Founders' Day, Old-Timers' Day, and, in February, we think Judge
Lindsey may address us--"
"Oh, are you doing any juvenile-court work?" said the hostess.
"We wanted his suggestions about it," Mrs. White said. "We feel that
if we COULD get some of the ladies interested--! Then here's the
French class once a week; German, Spanish, and the bridge club on
Fridays."
"Gracious! You use your clubhouse," said Mrs. Burgoyne.
"Nearly every day. So come on Tuesday," said the president
winningly, "and be our guest. A Miss Carroll is to sing, and
Professor Noyesmith, of Berkeley, will read a paper on: 'The City
Beautiful.' Keep that year-book; I butchered it, running through it
so fast."
"Well, just now," Mrs. Burgoyne began a little hesitatingly, "I'm
rather busy. I am at the Mail office while the girls are in school,
you know, and we have laid out an enormous lot of gardening for
afternoons. They never tire of gardening if I'm with them, but, of
course, no children will do that sort of thing alone; and it's doing
them both so much good that I don't want to stop it. Then they study
German and Italian with me, and on Saturday have a cooking lesson.
You see, my time is pretty full."
"But a good governess would take every bit of that off your hands,
me dear," said Mrs. Apostleman.
"Oh, but I love to do it!" protested Mrs. Burgoyne with her wide-
eyed, childish look. "You can't really buy for them what you can do
yourself, do you think so? And now the other children are beginning
to come in, and it's such fun! But that isn't all. I have editorial
work to do, besides the Mail, you know. I manage the 'Answers to
Mothers' column in a little eastern magazine. I daresay you've never
seen it; it is quite unpretentious, but it has a large circulation.
And these mothers write me, some of them factory-workers, or mothers
of child-workers even, or lonely women on some isolated ranch;
you've no idea how interesting it is! Of course they don't know who
I am, but we become good friends, just the same. I have the best
reference books about babies and sickness, and I give them the best
advice I can. Sometimes it's a boy's text-book that is wanted, or a
second-hand crib, or some dear old mother to get into a home, and
they are so self-respecting about it, and so afraid they aren't
paying fair--I love that work! But, of course, it takes time. Then
I've been hunting up a music-teacher for the girls. I can't teach
them that--"
"I meant to speak to you of that," Mrs. White said. "There's a
Monsieur Posti, Emil Posti, he studied with Leschetizky, you know,
who comes up from San Francisco every other week, and we all take
from him. In between times--"
"Oh, but I've engaged a nice little Miss Davids from Old Paloma,"
said Mrs. Burgoyne.
"From Old Paloma!" echoed three women together. And Mrs. Apostleman
added heavily, "Never heard of her!"
"I got a good little Swedish sewing-woman over there," the hostess
explained, "and she told me of this girl. She's a sweet girl; no
mother, and a little sister to bring up. She was quite pleased."
"But, good heavens! What does she know? What's her method?" demanded
Mrs. White in puzzled disapproval.
"She has a pretty touch," Mrs. Burgoyne said mildly, "and she's
bristling with ambition and ideas. She's not a genius, perhaps; but,
then, neither is either of the girls. I just want them to play for
their own pleasure, read accompaniments; something of that sort.
Don't you know how popular the girl who can play college songs
always is at a house-party?"
"Well, really--" Mrs. White began, almost annoyed; but she broke her
sentence off abruptly, and Mrs. Apostleman filled the pause.
"Whatever made ye go over there for a dress-maker?" she demanded.
"We never think of going there. There's a very good woman here, in
the Bank Building--"
"Madame Sorrel," supplemented Mrs. Adams.
"She's fearfully independent," Mrs. Lloyd contributed; "but she's
good. She made your pink, didn't she, Sue? Wayne said she did."
Mrs. Adams turned pink herself; the others laughed suddenly.
"Oh, you naughty girl!" Mrs. White said. "Did you tell Wayne you got
that frock in Santa Paloma?"
"What Wayne doesn't know won't hurt him," said his wife. "Sh! Here
they come!" And the conversation terminated abruptly, with much
laughter.
Mrs. Burgoyne's dinner-party dispersed shortly after ten o'clock, so
much earlier than was the custom in Santa Paloma that none of the
ordered motor-cars were in waiting. The guests walked home together,
absorbed in an animated conversation; for the gentlemen, who were
delighted to be getting home early, delighted with a dinner that, as
Wayne Adams remarked, "really stood for something to eat, not just
things passed to you, or put down in dabs before you," and delighted
with the pleasant informality of sitting down in daylight, were
enthusiastic in their praise of Mrs. Burgoyne. The ladies differed
with them.
"She knows how to do things," said Parker Lloyd. "Old Von Praag
himself said that she was a famous dinner-giver."
"I don't know what you'd say, Wayne," said Mrs. Adams patiently, "if
_I_ asked people to sit down to the dinner we had to-night! Of
course we haven't eight millions, but I would be ashamed to serve a
cocktail, a soup--I frankly admit it was delicious--steaks, plain
lettuce salad, and fruit. I don't count coffee and cheese. No wines,
no entrees; I think it was decidedly QUEER."
"I wish some of you others would try it," said Willard White
unexpectedly. "I never get dinners like that, except at the club,
down in town. The cocktail was a rare sherry, the steaks were
broiled to a turn, and the salad dressing was a wonder. She had her
cheese just ripe enough, and samovar coffee to wind up with--what
more do you want? I serve wine myself, but champagne keeps you
thirsty all night, and other wines put me to sleep. I don't miss
wine! I call it a bang-up dinner, don't you, Parker?"
Parker Lloyd, with his wife on his arm, felt discretion his part.
"Well," he said innocently selecting the one argument most
distasteful to the ladies, "it was a man's dinner, Will. It was just
what a man likes, served the way he likes it. But if the girls like
flummery and fuss, I don't see why they shouldn't have it."
"Really!" said Mrs. White with a laugh that showed a trace of
something not hilarious, "really, you are all too absurd! We are a
long way from the authorities here, but I think we will find out
pretty soon that simple dinners have become the fad in Washington,
or Paris, and that your marvelous Mrs. Burgoyne is simply following
the fashion like all the rest of us."
CHAPTER X
Barry had murmured something about "rush of work at the office" when
he came in a few minutes late for Mrs. Burgoyne's dinner, but as the
evening wore on, he seemed in no hurry to depart. Sidney was
delighted to see him really in his element with the Von Praags,
father and son, the awakened expression that was so becoming to him
on his face, and his curiously complex arguments stirring the old
man over and over again to laughter. She had been vexed at herself
for feeling a little shyness when he first came in; the unfamiliar
evening dress and the gravity of his handsome face had made him seem
almost a stranger, but this wore off, and after the other guests had
gone these four still sat laughing and talking like the best of old
friends together.
When the Von Praags had gone upstairs, she walked with him to the
porch, and they stood at the top of the steps for a moment, the rich
scent of the climbing LaMarque and Banksia roses heavy about them,
and the dark starry arch of the sky above. Sidney, a little tired,
but pleased with her dinner and her guests, and ready for a breath
of the sweet summer night before going upstairs, was confused by
having her heart suddenly begin to thump again. She looked at Barry,
his figure lost in the shadow, only his face dimly visible in the
starlight, and some feeling, new, young, terrifying, and yet
infinitely delicious, rushed over her. She might have been a girl of
seventeen instead of a sober woman fifteen years older, with
wifehood, and motherhood, and widowhood all behind her.
"A wonderful night!" said Barry, looking down at the dark mass of
tree-tops that almost hid the town, and at the rising circle of
shadows that was the hills.
"And a good place to be, Santa Paloma," Sidney added, contentedly.
"It's my captured dream, my own home and garden!" With her head
resting against one of the pillars of the porch, her eyes dreamily
moving from the hills to the sky and over the quiet woods, she went
on thoughtfully: "You know I never had a home, Barry; and when I
visited here, I began to realize what I was missing. How I longed
for Santa Paloma, the creek, and the woods, and my little sunny room
after I went away! But even when I was eighteen, and we took a house
in Washington, what could I do? I 'came out,' you know. I loved
gowns and parties then, as I hope the girls will some day; but I
knew all the while it wasn't living." She paused, but Barry did not
speak. "And, then, before I was twenty, I was married," Sidney went
on presently, "and we started off for St. Petersburg. And after
that, for years and years, I posed for dressmakers; I went the round
of jewelers, and milliners, and manicures; I wrote notes and paid
calls. I let one strange woman come in every day and wash my hands
for me, and another wash my hair, and a third dress me! I let men--
who were in the business simply to make money, and who knew how to
do it!--tell me that my furs must be recut, or changed, and my
jewels reset, and my wardrobe restocked and my furniture carried
away and replaced. And in the cities we lived in it's horrifying to
see how women slave, and toil, and worry to keep up. Half the women
I knew were sick over debts and the necessity for more debts. I felt
like saying, with Carlyle, 'Your chaos-ships must excuse me'; I'm
going back to Santa Paloma, to wear my things as long as they are
whole and comfortable, and do what I want to do with my spare time!"
"You missed your playtime," Barry said; "now you make the most of
it."
"Oh, no!" she answered, giving him a glimpse of serious eyes in the
half-dark, "playtime doesn't come back. But, at least, I know what I
want to do, and it will be more fun than any play. One of the wisest
men I ever knew set me thinking of these things. He's a sculptor, a
great sculptor, and he lives in an olive garden in Italy, and eats
what his peasants eat, and befriends them, and stands for their
babies in baptism, and sits with them when they're dying. My father
and I visited him about two years ago, and one day when he and I
were taking a tramp, I suddenly burst out that I envied him. I
wanted to live in an olive garden, too, and wear faded blue clothes,
and eat grapes, and tramp about the hills. He said very simply that
he had worked for twenty years to do it. 'You see, I'm a rich man,'
he said, 'and it seems that one must be rich in this world before
one dare be poor from choice. I couldn't do this if people didn't
know that I could have an apartment in Paris, and servants, and
motor-cars, and all the rest of it. It would hurt my daughters and
distress my friends. There are hundreds and thousands of unhappy
people in the world who can't afford to be poor, and if ever you get
a chance, you try it. You'll never be rich again.' So I wrote him
about a month ago that I had found MY olive garden," finished Sidney
contentedly, "and was enjoying it."
"Captain Burgoyne was older than you, Sid?" Barry questioned.
"Wouldn't he have loved this sort of life?"
"Twenty years older, yes; but he wouldn't have lived here for one
DAY!" she answered vivaciously. "He was a diplomat, a courtier to
his finger-tips. He was born to the atmosphere of hothouse flowers,
and salons, and delightful little drawing-room plots and gossip. He
loved politics, and power, and women in full dress, and men with
orders. Of course I was very new to it all, but he liked to spoil
me, draw me out. If it hadn't been for his accident, I never would
have grown up at all, I dare say. As it was, I was more like his
mother. We went to Washington for the season, New York for the
opera, England for autumn visits, Paris for the spring: I loved to
make him happy, Barry, and he wasn't happy except when we were
going, going, going. He was exceptionally popular; he had
exceptional friends, and he couldn't go anywhere without me. My
babies were with his mother--"
She paused, turning a white rose between her fingers. "And
afterwards," she said presently, "there was Father. And Father never
would spend two nights in the same place if he could help it,"
"I wasn't drawn back here as you were," said Barry thoughtfully, "I
liked New York; I could have made good there if I'd had a chance. It
made me sick to give it up, then; but lately I've been feeling
differently. A newspaper's a pretty influential thing, wherever it
is. I've been thinking about that clubhouse plan of yours; I wish to
the Lord that we could do something for those poor kids over there.
You're right. Those girls have rotten homes. The whole family
gathers in the parlor right after dinner. Pa takes his shoes off,
and props his socks up before the stove; Ma begins to hear a kid his
spelling; and other kids start the graphophone, and Aggie is
expected to ask her young man to walk right in. So after that she
meets him in the street, and the girls begin to talk about Aggie."
"Oh, Barry, I'm so glad you're interested!" Standing a step above
him, Sidney's ardent face was very close to his own. "Of course we
can do it," she said.
"We!" he echoed almost bitterly. "YOU'LL do it; you're the one--" He
broke off with a short, embarrassed laugh. "I was going to cut that
sort of thing out," he said gruffly, "but all roads lead to Rome, it
seems. I can't talk to you five minutes without--and I've got to go.
I said I'd look in at the office."
"You seem to be afraid to be friendly lately, Barry," said Mrs.
Burgoyne in a hurt voice, flinging away the rose she had been
holding, "but don't you think our friendship means something to me,
too? I don't like you to talk as if I did all the giving and you all
the taking. I don't know how the girls and I would get along without
your advice and help here at the Hall. I think," her voice broke
into a troubled laugh, "I think you forget that the quality of
friendship is not strained."
"Sidney," he said with sudden resolution, turning to face her
bravely, "I can't be just friends with you. You're so much the
finest, so much the best--" He left the sentence unfinished, and
began again: "You have a hundred men friends; you can't realize what
you mean to me. You--but you know what you are, and I'm the editor
of a mortgaged country paper, a man who has made a mess of things,
who can't take care of his kid, or himself, on his job without help-
-"
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