Books: An Open Eyed Conspiracy An Idyl of Saratoga
W >>
William Dean Howells >> An Open Eyed Conspiracy An Idyl of Saratoga
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 | 4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9
"Yes; are you?"
"I try to give myself the air of it when I am feeling very proud.
But really, we live at a most charming little hotel on a back
street, out of the whirl and rush that we should prefer to be in if
we could afford it." He said it must be delightful, and he made the
proper inquiries about Mrs. March. Kendricks never forgot the
gentleman in the artist, and he was as true to the convenances as if
they had been principles. That was what made Mrs. March like his
stories so much more than the stories of some people who wrote
better. He said he would drop in during the afternoon, and I went
indoors on the pretext of buying a newspaper. Then, without
engaging rooms for Mrs. Deering and Miss Gage, I hurried home.
CHAPTER VIII
"Well, did you get the rooms?" asked my wife as soon as she saw me.
She did not quite call it across the street to me as I came up from
where she sat on the piazza.
"No, I didn't," I said boldly, if somewhat breathlessly.
"Why didn't you? You ought to have gone to the States if they were
full at the Grand Union."
"They were not full, unless Kendricks got their last room."
"Do you mean that HE was there? Mr. Kendricks? If you are hoaxing
me, Basil!"
"I am not, my dear; indeed I'm not," said I, beginning to laugh, and
this made her doubt me the more.
"Because if you are I shall simply never forgive you. And I'm in
earnest this time," she replied.
"Why should I want to hoax you about such a vital thing as that.
Couldn't Kendricks come to Saratoga as well as we? He's here
looking up the ground of a story I should think from what he said."
"No matter what he's here for; he's here, and that's enough. I
never knew of anything so perfectly providential. Did you TELL him,
Basil? Did you dare?"
"Tell him what?"
"You know; about Miss Gage."
"Well, I came very near it. I dangled the fact before his eyes
once, but I caught it away again in time. He never saw it. I
thought I'd better let you tell him."
"Is he coming here to see us?"
"He asked if he might."
"He's always nice. I don't know that I shall ask him to do anything
for them, after all; I'm not sure that she's worth it. I wish some
commoner person had happened along. Kendricks is too precious. I
shall have to think about it; and don't you tease me, Basil, will
you?"
"I don't know. If I'm not allowed to have any voice in the matter,
I'm afraid I shall take it out in teasing. I don't see why Miss
Gage isn't quite as good as Kendricks. I believe she's taller, and
though he's pretty good-looking, I prefer her style of beauty. I
dare say his family is better, but I fancy she's richer; and his
family isn't good beyond New York city, and her money will go
anywhere. It's a pretty even thing."
"Good gracious, Basil! you talk as if it were a question of
marriage."
"And you THINK it is."
"Now I see that you're bent upon teasing, and we won't talk any
more, please. What time did he say he would call?"
"If I mayn't talk, I can't tell."
"You may talk that much."
"Well, then, he didn't say."
"Basil," said my wife, after a moment, "if you could be serious, I
should like very much to talk with you. I know that you're excited
by meeting Mr. Kendricks, and I know what you thought the instant
you saw him. But, indeed, it won't do, my dear. It's more than
we've any right to ask, and I shall not ask it, and I shall not let
you. She is a stiff, awkward village person, and I don't believe
she's amiable or intelligent; and to let a graceful, refined,
superior man like Mr. Kendricks throw away his time upon her would
be wicked, simply wicked. Let those people manage for themselves
from this out. Of course you mustn't get them rooms at the Grand
Union now, for he'd be seeing us there with them, and feel bound to
pay her attention. You must try for them at the States, since the
matter's been spoken of, or at Congress Hall. But there's no hurry.
We must have time to think whether we shall use Mr. Kendricks with
them. I suppose it will do no harm to introduce him. If he stays
we can't very well avoid it; and I confess I should like to see how
she impresses him! Of course we shall introduce him! But I insist
I shall just do it merely as one human being to another; and don't
you come in with any of your romantic nonsense, Basil, about her
social disappointment. Just how much did you give the situation
away?"
I told as well as I could remember. "Well, that's nothing. He'll
never think of it, and you mustn't hint anything of the kind again."
I promised devoutly, and she went on -
"It wouldn't be nice--it wouldn't be delicate to let him into the
conspiracy. That must be entirely our affair, don't you see? And I
don't want you to take a single step without me. I don't want you
even to discuss her with him. Will you? Because that will tempt
you further."
That afternoon Kendricks came promptly to call, like the little
gentleman he was, and he was more satisfactory about Saratoga than
he had been in the morning even. Mrs. March catechised him, and she
didn't leave an emotion of his unsearched by her vivid sympathy.
She ended by saying -
"You must write a story about Saratoga. And I have got just the
heroine for you."
I started, but she ignored my start.
Kendricks laughed, delighted, and asked, "Is she pretty?"
"Must a heroine be pretty?"
"She had better be. Otherwise she will have to be tremendously
clever and say all sorts of brilliant things, and that puts a great
burden on the author. If you proclaim boldly at the start that
she's a beauty, the illustrator has got to look after her, and the
author has a comparative sinecure."
Mrs. March thought a moment, and then she said: "Well, she is a
beauty. I don't want to make it too hard for you."
"When shall I see her?" Kendricks demanded, and he feigned an
amusing anxiety.
"Well, that depends upon how you behave, Mr. Kendricks. If you are
very, very good, perhaps I may let you see her this evening. We
will take you to call upon her."
"Is it possible? Do you mean business? Then she is--in society?"
"MR. Kendricks!" cried Mrs. March, with burlesque severity. "Do you
think that I would offer you a heroine who was NOT in society? You
forget that I am from Boston!"
"Of course, of course! I understand that any heroine of your
acquaintance must be in society. But I thought--I didn't know--but
for the moment--Saratoga seems to be so tremendously mixed; and Mr.
March says there is no society here: But if she is from Boston--"
"I didn't say she was from Boston, Mr. Kendricks."
"Oh, I beg your pardon!"
"She is from De Witt Point," said Mrs. March, and she apparently
enjoyed his confusion, no less than my bewilderment at the course
she was taking.
I was not going to be left behind, though, and I said: "I
discovered this heroine myself, Kendricks, and if there is to be any
giving away--"
"Now, Basil!"
"I am going to do it. Mrs. March would never have cared anything
about her if it hadn't been for me. I can't let her impose on you.
This heroine is no more in society than she is from Boston. That is
the trouble with her. She has come here for society, and she can't
find any."
"Oh, that was what you were hinting at this morning," said
Kendricks. "I thought it a pure figment of the imagination."
"One doesn't imagine such things as that, my dear fellow. One
imagines a heroine coming here, and having the most magnificent kind
of social career--lawn-parties, lunches, teas, dinners, picnics,
hops--and going back to De Witt Point with a dozen offers of
marriage. That's the kind of work the imagination does. But this
simple and appealing situation--this beautiful young girl, with her
poor little illusions, her secret hopes half hidden from herself,
her ignorant past, her visionary future--"
"Now, _I_ am going to tell you all about her, Mr. Kendricks," Mrs.
March broke in upon me, with defiance in her eye; and she flung out
the whole fact with a rapidity of utterance that would have left far
behind any attempt of mine. But I made no attempt to compete with
her; I contented myself with a sarcastic silence which I could see
daunted her a little at last.
"And all that we've done, my dear fellow"--I took in irony the word
she left to me--"is to load ourselves up with these two impossible
people, to go their security to destiny, and answer for their having
a good time. We're in luck."
"Why, I don't know," said Kendricks, and I could see that his fancy
was beginning to play with the situation; "I don't see why it isn't
a charming scheme."
"Of course it is," cried Mrs. March, taking a little heart from his
courage.
"We can't make out yet whether the girl is interesting," I put in
maliciously.
"That is what YOU say," said my wife. "She is very shy, and of
course she wouldn't show out her real nature to you. I found her
VERY interesting."
"Now, Isabel!" I protested.
"She is fascinating," the perverse woman persisted. "She has a
fascinating dulness."
Kendricks laughed and I jeered at this complex characterisation.
"You make me impatient to judge for myself," he said.
"Will you go with me to call upon them this evening?" asked Mrs.
March.
"I shall be delighted. And you can count upon me to aid and abet
you in your generous conspiracy, Mrs. March, to the best of my
ability. There's nothing I should like better than to help you--"
"Throw 'dust in her beautiful eyes,'" I quoted.
"Not at all," said my wife. "But to spread a beatific haze over
everything, so that as long as she stays in Saratoga she shall see
life rose-colour. Of course you may say that it's a kind of
deception--"
"Not at all!" cried the young fellow in his turn. "We will make it
reality. Then there will be no harm in it."
"What a jesuitical casuist! You had better read what Cardinal
Newman says in his Apologia about lying, young man."
Neither of them minded me, for just then there was a stir of drapery
round the corner of the piazza from where we were sitting, and the
next moment Mrs. Deering and Miss Gage showed themselves.
"We were just talking of you," said Mrs. March. "May I present our
friend Mr. Kendricks, Mrs. Deering? And Miss Gage?"
At sight of the young man, so well dressed and good-looking, who
bowed so prettily to her, and then bustled to place chairs for them,
a certain cloud seemed to lift from Miss Gage's beautiful face, and
to be at least partly broken on Mrs. Deering's visage. I began to
talk to the girl, and she answered in good spirits, and with more
apparent interest in my conversation than she had yet shown, while
Kendricks very properly devoted himself to the other ladies. Both
his eyes were on them, but I felt that he had a third somehow upon
her, and that the smallest fact of her beauty and grace was not lost
upon him. I knew that her rich, tender voice was doing its work,
too, through the commonplaces she vouchsafed to me. There was a
moment when I saw him lift a questioning eyebrow upon Mrs. March,
and saw her answer with a fleeting frown of affirmation. I cannot
tell just how it was that, before he left us, his chair was on the
other side of Miss Gage's, and I was eliminated from the dialogue.
He did not stay too long. There was another tableau of him on foot,
taking leave of Mrs. March, with a high hand-shake, which had then
lately come in, and which I saw the girl note, and then bowing to
her and to Mrs. Deering.
"Don't forget," my wife called after him, with a ready invention not
lost on his quick intelligence, "that you're going to the concert
with us after tea. Eight o'clock, remember."
"You may be sure I shall remember THAT," he returned gaily.
CHAPTER IX
The countenances of the ladies fell instantly when he was gone.
"Mrs. March," said Mrs. Deering, with a nervous tremor, "did Mr.
March get us those rooms at the Grand Union?"
"No--no," my wife began, and she made a little pause, as if to
gather plausibility. "The Grand Union was very full, and he thought
that at the States--"
"Because," said Mrs. Deering, "I don't know as we shall trouble him,
after all. Mr. Deering isn't very well, and I guess we have got to
go home--"
"GO HOME!" Mrs. March echoed, and her voice was a tone-scene of a
toppling hope and a widespread desolation. "Why, you mustn't!"
"We must, I guess. It had begun to be very pleasant, and--I guess I
have got to go. I can't feel easy about him."
"Why, of course," Mrs. March now assented, and she waved her fan
thoughtfully before her face. I knew what she was thinking of, and
I looked at Miss Gage, who had involuntarily taken the pose and
expression of the moment when I first saw her at the kiosk in
Congress Park. "And Miss Gage?"
"Oh yes; I must go too," said the girl wistfully, forlornly. She
had tears in her voice, tears of despair and vexation, I should have
said.
"That's too bad," said Mrs. March, and, as she did not offer any
solution of the matter, I thought it rather heartless of her to go
on and rub it in. "And we were just planning some things we could
do together."
"It can't be helped now," returned the girl.
"But we shall see you again before you go?" Mrs. March asked of
both.
"Well, I don't know," said the girl, with a look at Mrs. Deering,
who now said -
"I guess so. We'll let you know when we're going." And they got
away rather stiffly.
"Why in the world, my dear," I asked, "if you weren't going to
promote their stay, need you prolong the agony of their
acquaintance?"
"Did you feel that about it too? Well, I wanted to ask you first if
you thought it would do."
"What do?"
"You know; get her a room here. Because if we do we shall have her
literally on our hands as long as we are here. We shall have to
have the whole care and responsibility of her, and I wanted you to
feel just what you were going in for. You know very well I can't do
things by halves, and that if I undertake to chaperon this girl I
shall chaperon her--"
"To the bitter end. Yes; I understand the conditions of your
uncompromising conscience. But I don't believe it will be any such
killing matter. There are other semi-detached girls in the house;
she could go round with them."
We talked on, and, as sometimes happens, we convinced each other so
thoroughly that she came to my ground and I went to hers. Then it
was easier for us to come together, and after making me go to the
clerk and find out that he had a vacant room, Mrs. March agreed with
me that it would not do at all to have Miss Gage stay with us; the
fact that there was a vacant room seemed to settle the question.
We were still congratulating ourselves on our escape when Mrs.
Deering suddenly reappeared round our corner of the verandah. She
was alone, and she looked excited.
"Oh, it isn't anything," she said in answer to the alarm that showed
itself in Mrs. March's face at sight of her. "I hope you won't
think it's too presuming, Mrs. March, and I want you to believe that
it's something I have thought of by myself, and that Julia wouldn't
have let me come if she had dreamed of such a thing. I do hate so
to take her back with me, now that she's begun to have a good time,
and I was wondering--wondering whether it would be asking too much
if I tried to get her a room here. I shouldn't exactly like to
leave her in the hotel alone, though I suppose it would be perfectly
proper; but Mr. Deering found out when he was trying to get rooms
before that there were some young ladies staying by themselves here,
and I didn't want to ask the clerk for a room unless you felt just
right about it."
"Why, of course, Mrs. Deering. It's a public house, like any other,
and you have as much right--"
"But I didn't want you to think that I would do it without asking
you, and if it is going to be the least bit of trouble to you." The
poor thing while she talked stood leaning anxiously over toward Mrs.
March, who had risen, and pressing the points of her fingers
nervously together.
"It won't, Mrs. Deering. It will be nothing but pleasure. Why,
certainly. I shall be delighted to have Miss Gage here, and
anything that Mr. March and I can do--Why, we had just been talking
of it, and Mr. March has this minute got back from seeing the clerk,
and she can have a very nice room. We had been intending to speak
to you about it as soon as we saw you."
I do not know whether this was quite true or not, but I was glad
Mrs. March said it, from the effect it had upon Mrs. Deering. Tears
of relief came into her eyes, and she said: "Then I can go home in
the morning. I was going to stay on a day or two longer, on Julia's
account, but I didn't feel just right about Mr. Deering, and now I
won't have to."
There followed a flutter of polite offers and refusals,
acknowledgments and disavowals, and an understanding that I would
arrange it all, and that we would come to Mrs. Deering's hotel after
supper and see Miss Gage about the when and the how of her coming to
us."
"Well, Isabel," I said, after it was all over, and Mrs. Deering had
vanished in a mist of happy tears, "I suppose this is what you call
perfectly providential. Do you really believe that Miss Gage didn't
send her back?"
"I know she didn't. But I know that she HAD to do it just the same
as if Miss Gage had driven her at the point of the bayonet."
I laughed at this tragical image. "Can she be such a terror?"
"She is an ideal. And Mrs. Deering is as afraid as death of her.
Of course she has to live up to her. It's probably been the
struggle of her life, and I can quite imagine her letting her
husband die before she would take Miss Gage back, unless she went
back satisfied."
"I don't believe I can imagine so much as that exactly, but I can
imagine her being afraid of Miss Gage's taking it out of her
somehow. Now she will take it out of us. I hope you realise that
you've done it now, my dear. To be sure, you will have all your
life to repent of your rashness."
"I shall never repent," Mrs. March retorted hardily. "It was the
right thing, the only thing. We couldn't have let that poor
creature stay on, when she was so anxious to get back to her
husband."
"No."
"And I confess, Basil, that I feel a little pity for that poor girl,
too. It would have been cruel, it would have been fairly wicked, to
let her go home so soon, and especially now."
"Oh! And I suppose that by ESPECIALLY NOW, you mean Kendricks," I
said, and I laughed mockingly, as the novelists say. "How sick I am
of this stale old love-business between young people! We ought to
know better--we're old enough; at least YOU are."
She seemed not to feel the gibe. "Why, Basil," she asked dreamily,
"haven't you any romance left in you?"
"Romance? Bah! It's the most ridiculous unreality in the world.
If you had so much sympathy for that stupid girl, in that poor woman
in her anxiety about her disappointment, why hadn't you a little for
her sick husband? But a husband is nothing--when you have got him."
"I did sympathise with her."
"You didn't say so."
"Well, she is only his second wife, and I don't suppose it's
anything serious. Didn't I really say anything to her?"
"Not a word. It is curious," I went on, "how we let this idiotic
love-passion absorb us to the very last. It is wholly unimportant
who marries who, or whether anybody marries at all. And yet we no
sooner have the making of a love-affair within reach than we revert
to the folly of our own youth, and abandon ourselves to it as if it
were one of the great interests of life."
"Who is talking about love? It isn't a question of that. It's a
question of making a girl have a pleasant time for a few days; and
what is the harm of it? Girls have a dull enough time at the very
best. My heart aches for them, and I shall never let a chance slip
to help them, I don't care what you say."
"Now, Isabel," I returned, "don't you be a humbug. This is a
perfectly plain case, and you are going in for a very risky affair
with your eyes open. You shall not pretend you're not."
"Very well, then, if I am going into it with my eyes open, I shall
look out that nothing happens."
"And you think prevision will avail! I wish," I said, "that instead
of coming home that night and telling you about this girl, I had
confined my sentimentalising to that young French-Canadian mother,
and her dirty little boy who ate the pea-nut shells. I've no doubt
it was really a more tragical case. They looked dreadfully poor and
squalid. Why couldn't I have amused my idle fancy with their
fortunes--the sort of husband and father they had, their shabby
home, the struggle of their life? That is the appeal that a genuine
person listens to. Nothing does more to stamp me a poseur than the
fact that I preferred to bemoan myself for a sulky girl who seemed
not to be having a good time."
There was truth in my joking, but the truth did not save me; it lost
me rather. "Yes," said my wife; "it was your fault. I should never
have seen anything in her if it had not been for you. It was your
coming back and working me up about her that began the whole thing,
and now if anything goes wrong you will have yourself to thank for
it."
She seized the opportunity of my having jestingly taken up this load
to buckle it on me tight and fast, clasping it here, tying it there,
and giving a final pull to the knots that left me scarcely the power
to draw my breath, much less the breath to protest. I was forced to
hear her say again that all her concern from the beginning was for
Mrs. Deering, and that now, if she had offered to do something for
Miss Gage, it was not because she cared anything for her, but
because she cared everything for Mrs. Deering, who could never lift
up her head again at De Witt Point if she went back so completely
defeated in all the purposes she had in asking Miss Gage to come
with her to Saratoga.
I did not observe that this wave of compassion carried Mrs. March so
far as to leave her stranded with Mrs. Deering that evening when we
called with Kendricks, and asked her and Miss Gage to go with us to
the Congress Park concert. Mrs. Deering said that she had to pack,
that she did not feel just exactly like going; and my tender heart
ached with a knowledge of her distress. Miss Gage made a faint,
false pretence of refusing to come with us, too; but Mrs. Deering
urged her to go, and put on the new dress, which had just come home,
so that Mrs. March could see it. The girl came back looking
radiant, divine, and--"Will it do?" she palpitated under my wife's
critical glance.
"Do? It will OUTdo! I never saw anything like it!" The
connoisseur patted it a little this way and a little that. "It is a
dream! Did the hat come too?"
It appeared that the hat had come too. Miss Gage rematerialised
with it on, after a moment's evanescence, and looked at my wife with
the expression of being something impersonal with a hat on.
"Simply, there is nothing to say!" cried Mrs. March. The girl put
up her hands to it. "Good gracious! You mustn't take it off! Your
costume is perfect for the concert."
"Is it, really?" asked the girl joyfully; and she seemed to find
this the first fitting moment to say, for sole recognition of our
self-sacrifice, "I'm much obliged to you, Mr. March, for getting me
that room."
I begged her not to speak of it, and turned an ironical eye upon my
wife; but she was lost in admiration of the hat.
"Yes," she sighed; "it's much better than the one I wanted you to
get at first." And she afterward explained that the girl seemed to
have a perfect instinct for what went with her style.
Kendricks kept himself discreetly in the background, and, with his
unfailing right feeling, was talking to Mrs. Deering, in spite of
her not paying much attention to him. I must own that I too was
absorbed in the spectacle of Miss Gage.
She went off with us, and did not say another word to Mrs. Deering
about helping her to pack. Perhaps this was best, though it seemed
heartless; it may not have been so heartless as it seemed. I dare
say it would have been more suffering to the woman if the girl had
missed this chance.
CHAPTER X
We had undertaken rather a queer affair but it was not so queer
after all, when Miss Gage was fairly settled with us. There were
other young girls in that pleasant house who had only one another's
protection and the general safety of the social atmosphere. We
could not conceal from ourselves, of course, that we had done a
rather romantic thing, and, in the light of Europe, which we had
more or less upon our actions, rather an absurd thing; but it was a
comfort to find that Miss Gage thought it neither romantic nor
absurd. She took the affair with an apparent ignorance of anything
unusual in it--with so much ignorance, indeed, that Mrs. March had
her occasional question whether she was duly impressed with what was
being done for her. Whether this was so or not, it is certain that
she was as docile and as biddable as need be. She did not always
ask what she should do; that would not have been in the tradition of
village independence; but she always did what she was told, and did
not vary from her instructions a hair's-breadth. I do not suppose
she always knew why she might do this and might not do that; and I
do not suppose that young girls often understand the reasons of the
proprieties. They are told that they must, and that they must not,
and this in an astonishing degree suffices them if they are nice
girls.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 | 4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9