Ainslee's Magazine/The Woman With a Past/Renaissance
IV.—RENAISSANCE
The year’s at the spring
And day’s at the morn;
••••
God's in his Heaven,
All's right with the world.—Pippa Passes.
THE country? I should think I would! Yes, One Hundred and Fifty-fifth Street Elevated at nine. It's a lovely idea, Gregory.”
Pippa hung up the receiver in a sort of sober glow. How wonderful it was to have Gregory Markham for a friend! A friend! She said that word over to herself sometimes as if it were a spell, or a holy phrase to exorcise demons. So some women whisper “love,” or “motherhood.” Motherhood was still a sacred word to Philippa Carpenter, but she did not say it over to herself. In her heart was a silence whenever she came to that word; she had put it out of her vocabulary of life. And love? Once it had been the will-o'-the-wisp that led her over the marshes and into the wilderness. Now—well, there was very little glamour about the word now to Pippa Carpenter. The will-o'-the-wisp's lantern was out, and—she was still in the wilderness.
But—a friend! Friendship was for Pippa the supreme luxury, the divine indulgence. She had never in all her life had a man friend before. Gregory was not the least bit in love with her—how grateful she was that he was not! He could meet her eyes squarely, laugh at her affectionately, contradict her crossly on occasions; he could even tell her when there was too much powder on her nose, and her side combs needed pushing in! Also, he had never once said that she was beautiful, or exquisite, or wonderful, or provocative, or any of the other things which she undoubtedly was, and which other men had for years been exhausting tautology to explain to her. She adored being ordered about by him, and scolded, and made fun of, and taken care of—just as if she had been his kid sister.
Yes, they were friends. All that spring they had been “playing” together, taking heavenly trips into the country or off to the sea, for lunch, or dinner, or long, rambling afternoons. They had stopped for tea at queer old inns, and they had picked the first arbutus in the woods, digging it out from under the dead leaves of last year. And they had sat perfectly silent beside the sea for twenty minutes on end, and then come out of their brown study with the same half laugh, and friendly meeting of eyes It had been the best springtide in Pippa Carpenter's life—except, possibly, one April very long ago, when her name, Philippa, had been thus abbreviated because, like the poet's morning-hearted Pippa, her creed was, “All's right with the world!”
That, however, was a long time ago—a very long time ago, she told herself, as she wistfully studied her reflection in the mirror that morning. She wondered whether other people could read the histories and heartaches that were written in delicate shadows on her lovely ivory-white face. The heavy hair, deep red with winy lights in it, was as beautiful as ever; the purple-gray eyes were clear and sweet—it was only the look of them that was old. And yet—Pippa had a breathless sense, rare with her, of the perilous race of time—the brevity of all things, even of herself.
The thought startled her. There had been months and years when she had chafed against the gradual and leisurely coming of the end. It had seemed to her like that incomparable torture of the dropping water. The first ten—even the first hundred or thousand drops, fell on your head lightly enough; then they began to beat like hammers on your very brain. After a while, a very long while, you died of it. That was like life, as Mrs. Carpenter had viewed it for a large majority of her days. For the first time in fifteen years, she felt, this windy spring morning, as if she must hurry. The star was just setting—were her feet swift enough to follow it yet a little farther below the horizon?
She turned resolutely from the looking-glass, and pulled on her gloves. It was half past eight. The air was cool, but sweet. Already the breath of summer was in it. She had chosen the simplest gown and hat she owned—exquisite both, and subtly becoming, but as guileless as a young girl's clothes. She looked, in spite of her progression to the late thirties, as young as spring itself,
When she met Gregory on the elevated platform, he smiled at her approvingly.
“You look bully!” he told her, with cordial candor. “Your hat's crooked—over your left ear. That's better. Lord, think of wearing gloves a morning like this!”
She laughed joyously, and pealed off the offending suède.
“Put them in your pocket!” she commanded, and he crammed them in with matches, time-tables, small change, loose cigarettes, and the raft of other masculine driftwood that proves all men incurably small-boyish. She looked at him with a warm tenderness. His rugged face was not a bit handsome, but it was a good face. She knew it pretty well now, and could read all sorts of kindly lines about the firm mouth and the honest hazel eyes. He was a dear fellow—she hoped, with an almost motherly pang, that he was going to find life good to him.
But to-day he seemed different from his usual breezy self. All the way out into the country, he seemed unusually preoccupied and ill at ease, and all her arts and wiles could not seem to lighten the constraint.
“You're not up to your regular form, Gregory,” she reproached him, as they left the little suburban station and walked slowly along the shining country road that might lead to the village street or to a forest. He laughed shortly, but did not answer.
Two early butterflies, as pale as little tea-rose petals, fluttered above the hedge. There was a patch of bluets, as azure as the sky itself.
“We used to call them innocents,” murmured Pippa, speaking her idle thoughts aloud. Gregory did not seem to hear.
“Look!” she exclaimed, with soft eagerness. “Those blessed birds—circling round each other—Gregory Do you think they are—making love?”
“It's the mating season,” said Gregory simply.
The two robins flew away across a fragrant, teeming field, to the woodlands, searching a place to build their nest.
Pippa quoted under her breath:
“Each to each imparting sweet intents
For this new year, as brooding bird to bird.”
She broke off to gather some dandelions, a handful of little stars; the scent of them was pungent and fresh like spring itself,
“I want dandelion salad for lunch!” she announced shamelessly. Suddenly she saw that Gregory was altogether out of her irresponsible, whimsical mood.
“Doesn't it feel springlike, poor thing?” she queried solicitously.
“I feel springlike all right,” said Gregory, with some asperity; “only I can't chatter about it as much as you do!”
Philippa regarded him open-eyed. He had never accused her of chattering before.
“What's the matter with you, Gregory?” she demanded quietly. “You aren't a bit like yourself.”
“No, I'm not,” he returned, scowling at the pale green of a young birch tree. “I—to tell you the truth,” he burst out, “I've got you out here on false pretenses!”
“What sort of pretenses?” she wanted to know, quite undismayed. “Are you going to take me to a summer resort, where there are automobiles and dreadful young persons playing tennis, and bridge parties and”
“No,” he interrupted, “but I am going to take you to a hotel.”
“Well,” said Philippa tolerantly, “I suppose we must eat in the time. Personally, I should prefer a farmhouse or a strawberry patch. but the first might be inhospitable, and the second unripe. What is the matter with you, Gregory? You look frightfully uncomfortable.”
“I am,” he said, with rather a rueful grin. “You see—I've never been engaged before.”
Pippa stopped stock-still.
“Engaged?” she repeated, in an amazed tone.
He nodded, stopping too. “I'm taking you to see the girl I'm going to marry,” he said, without looking at her.
There was a moment's pause, then Pippa said, in an odd, rather breathless voice: “We look like two idiots standing here in the middle of the road!” They began to walk on, in the sweet spring sunshine. “Who is she?” asked Mrs, Carpenter presently.
“Just—a girl.” Gregory seemed to be more natural now that the plunge had been taken. “A dear, human girl You—oh, hang it, let's be honest! You may think she doesn't quite 'belong' when you meet her first. She's knocked about, and had a very hard time—been on the stage and all that—she's English—not first-class English. Her father was a grocer—she's quite honest about it, bless her! But she's young, and sweet, and as honest as the sun. A—a good little girl, Pippa, and pretty.
“Of course!” Pippa permitted herself to Say.
“Don't be catty!” he chided good-humoredly. “Nice women always hate to see their men friends marry, but it's a beastly dog-in-the-manger trick! You'd never look at us yourselves, but you don't want any one else to steal us!”
He could always say rude things without being rude; in any case, Pippa was not in a mood to be resentful of trifles. She was meditating with a sense of appallment on Gregory's account of his fiancée: “A grocer's daughter”—“been on the stage”—“knocked about”—the specifications were not reassuring. Oh, Gregory should have married some one exquisite, and fresh, and lovely, like a flower—a garden flower, the fine result of care and cultivation!
Philippa had a deep-seated respect for her own class. She had turned her back upon it years ago, and had herself betrayed it in a dozen ways, but noblesse oblige was still the most living item in her rather casual code of morals and manners. Evidently, Gregory had not chosen a lady—that was what it came to. She thought the ache in her heart was from her disappointment about that, and her apprehension for her friend's future. But it was a deeper pang than she knew, and it was rooted in that tearing loneliness which assails the human soul most savagely in the spring.
In a little time, they came to the hotel—hardly more than a country boarding house; and a moment later a rustle at the door of the damp and musty little sitting room drove the blood to Philippa's heart.
She rose eagerly, almost nervously for her, to see the girl Gregory Markham was going to marry. At first, all she noted was a stiff and schoolgirlish white muslin dress with a pink sash. The head was covered with pretty brown hair, curling tightly; the face—Pippa nearly sank into a chair—for a moment she could neither see nor hear.
As if from a great distance, Gregory's voice came to her:
“I'm going out to smoke. I want you two to make friends, and you'll do it better without me.”
He vanished into the green spring world out of doors, and Pippa, with a tremendous effort, dispelled the cobwebs from her astonished brain and faced the girl in the white muslin.
“Gladys Harrison!” she said, slowly dragging the name up from the recesses of her memory.
The girl nodded. She was decidedly pretty, with a fresh skin and china-blue eyes. Her complexion was, in fact, too good to need rouge, but Pippa saw a faint bloom that was not of nature upon her smooth cheeks. A man would not have noticed it at all. The girl had a full, red mouth; she was slender and shapely, and her curly brown hair was abundant. A Frenchwoman of her sort would have been chic and insinuating; poor Gladys Harrison did not have the bravado of her class. She came of an inferior stratum—a caste bred to service, to petty trade, and to pettier roguery. And she never seemed to have wholly forgotten the fact.
With the curiously inverted idea of bettering her condition, she had run away with a bookmaker who had “something sure” at Ascot. There had been a rather ugly scandal—a boy who had lost a fortune, a suicide, and the arrest of the bookmaker; and Gladys had had to decide between going home to Hammersmith and the choleric greengrocer father, and starting out to seek her fortune elsewhere.
The chimeric fortune allured her more than her father's inevitable punishment, and she moved into London. Philippa had run across her there, it matters not how. Gladys Harrison was one of the many derelicts that Mrs. Carpenter, a bit of a tramp steamer herself, had tried to tow into harbor. She had failed, but because, to a girl of this type, emotional appeal is always the strongest. That fact had hitherto been Gladys Harrison's undoing. Might it now be her salvation? Pippa had though of her more than once, and wondered whether she had drifted out on the tide that draws down Piccadilly Circus at night.
She had lost sight of her for many years, and now she stood there, in a white muslin dress with pink ribbons—Gladys Harrison and none other—in a suburban New York boarding house; and—and—Pippa felt the world whirling about her—it was she who was Markham's “dear, human girl!” Oh, monstrous, unbelievable! Such things cannot happen—we all know that they can never, never happen until—they do!
Before Philippa could compose herself enough to find her voice, the girl herself began to speak:
“Mrs, Carpenter—aren't you going to give my chance?”
The pretty, flushed face was quivering under what Gladys Harrison believed to be a nonchalant air. Her eyes looked round like a child's.
“Gladys Harrison!” Pippa said again. “What are you doing here?”
The girl smiled almost shyly. “Don't you know?” she said. “I thought he would have told you.”
“He told me” The words stuck in Mrs. Carpenter's throat.
“That we were going to be married? Yes. I always knew I'd be happy some time,” said Gladys Harrison rather piteously. Some stern, shocked look in the other woman's face brought a sudden sober expression to her own.
“Mrs, Carpenter,” she said, evidently seeking for words, “aren't you going to give me my chance? I'm straight enough now.” Again that pathetic flush and quiver. “If he finds out, I—I'll kill myself, I guess. If he doesn't Oh, I'll be a good wife to him—and all the better because—because of—that!” said Gladys, and Philippa knew that she was referring to the past.
“But it isn't right—it isn't fair!” exclaimed Pippa. “He doesn't know—he doesn't dream—it's—can't you see it's cheating him?”
Suddenly Gladys stared at Pippa with a curious look.
“Is that it?” she said. “Do you love him yourself?”
“No!” cried Pippa proudly. “He is my friend! You can't understand that.”
“Oh, yes,” said the girl quietly. “I can understand that. Once a man helped me over a bad place with my rent, and never let me—pay him back. You understand? I think he was a friend. Mrs. Carpenter, aren't you going to give me my chance?”
Gladys Harrison was one of those soft and pliable creatures seemingly created only to be loved and to love. She was, to use a country idiom of her own country, “marked for love.” A great passion might develop her into a fine woman or blast her utterly. She could be shaped and touched by no other medium. Very simple and very young, in spite of her sins, she seemed to be the type of girl whose freshness is renewed with every fresh emotion. In the childlike blue eyes burned now a divine flame of devoted tenderness. There was a sudden frank and desperate appeal in them as she waited, watching the other woman's face.
Pippa turned away from her and looked out of the window. The gay, green world was busy beginning the year once more. Birds were calling their mates, trees were budding, new grass blades were pushing pluckily up among the old brown roots. The whole earth seemed to be starting over again. The idea came to Pippa with a sort of shock. Starting over again! Why, everything in nature was given a chance to begin again! Why had she never thought of that before? It was only man who found things irrevocable; God never did. Every single year He let the growing world begin again, and see what it could do this time!
There was a hot mist in Philippa's eyes as she turned back to Gladys Harrison.
“Do you love him?” she demanded abruptly. “Really love him?”
The girl's face flushed slowly. Her life had not made it easy for her to voice a noble or a sincere sentiment, but she tried.
“He—why—he's just about everything!” she said haltingly. “I” She raised her eyes to Mrs. Carpenter's. “He's just about everything!” she repeated.
Gladys was the type of eternal humanity—erring and aspiring, falling and struggling up from the mire, continually working out a strange sequence of retrogression and progress. Whether such souls go on or fall back, who shall say? It had seemed to Pippa that Gladys was hopeless—but something had kindled the fires anew in her sluggish spirit. She was, for the moment, at any rate, moving forward with the morning light in her face. Would it last? Could Philippa Carpenter assume the awful responsibility of believing that it would last?
“Aren't you going to give me my chance?” reiterated Gladys Harrison, repeating herself lamely, but with a sob in her throat.
“I—think I am,” said Pippa, in a low voice. It was her capitulation, and the strength seemed to go out of her with the words. She drooped a little where she stood. Her friend! Her friend! Oh, it had been too good and sweet to last! She must go out onto the Great Highway again, and leave the spring world to its nesting
“Good-by,” she said to Gladys Harrison, and managed to smile. “Begin again—and good luck to you!”
She went out into the growing, green world.