Bobbie, General Manager/Chapter 13
CHAPTER XIII
MANY months have passed since Dr. Maynard went to Europe. There have been two crops of chestnuts for me to gather alone in October since he sailed away—two dull, grey, unimportant Christmas nights since my ridiculous happiest one. Edith has been in command of my father's house for so long now that all the difficult adjustments have been made, the machinery is running without an audible squeak, and the house itself has developed into a plant as imposing and prosperous as a modern factory. As I write to-day I am sitting in my elaborate new bedroom, built on over the new porte-cochère—my old room was cut up into two baths and a shower—and am surrounded with rose cretonne hangings, lacy curtains, and delicately shaded electric lights.
Even the people in my life have changed so radically that I hardly recognise them as the ones that I once worked and cared for. Ruth has grown into a charming young lady; the twins have graduated from college and are earning their own way—Malcolm in New York and Oliver in a lumber camp out West; Tom is middle-aged; Elise, whom I visited last winter, is becoming a little stout and her hair is sprinkled through with grey; Alec has buried his personality in Edith; nothing is as it was. Even Hilton is different. The old Brooks Hotel on Main Street, where George Washington once stopped for over night, has been torn down; there's a new postoffice, a new City Hall; there's a double-tracked electric-car line to Boston. There are two taxicabs in the town now and a new theatre. Dr. Maynard's house looks like a tomb. The wisteria vine is the only live thing about it. Like hair it keeps on growing after death—winding, coiling, across the doors and window-panes with no hand to push it back. A young man just graduated from medical school has taken Dr. Maynard's practice; and as for kind, gentle Dr. Maynard himself I begin to doubt if such a person ever existed. When he went away he sold his automobile to Jake Pickens, a plumber down on Blondell Street, and to-day as I glided grandly by in Edith's limousine I observed Mr. Pickens wheezing up Main Street, chugging along with awful difficulty. The poor old machine looked about ready for the junk heap. A great wave of pity for it swept over me that brought tears to my eyes. Oh, I wish I could have kept right straight on with my old story. But I suppose everything has got to change, houses and towns and automobiles, as well as people and their histories.
I can hardly believe it was only two years ago that I used to climb into the cupola and lock myself away from everything below. There is no cupola now. It was cut off, like an offending wart. I was surprised to discover what a perfectly enormous thing it was as it stood upon the lawn waiting to be carried off. It reminded me of a horse that has fallen down on the pavement—symmetrical enough in its proper position, but dreadfully awkward and absolutely colossal sprawling about on the ground. Why, it took four horses to drag it up to old Silas Morton's. Silas Morton is a farmer up near Sag Hill and he bought my sacred temple for fifteen dollars. He uses it for a hen-house! It seemed to me like sacrilege, but the hens laid eggs in it, Mr. Morton said, as if they were possessed. The upper part of the window-panes in the cupola are made of yellow stained-glass, and he thinks—Silas Morton is kind of an inventor—that the hens have an idea it's sunshine and that spring is coming. I tell him the cupola is inspired. I saw a picture once of a common little farmhouse where Mrs. Eddy wrote her book, "Science and Health." If my book were to be published, and some photographer took a picture of the house in which I wrote it, I guess that old hen-coop would win the prize for an odd spot in which to have an inspiration.
With the cupola gone and the French roof entirely obliterated, the iron fence and the iron fountain sold to a junk man, a spreading porte-cochère at one side of the house, a billiard-room at the other, low verandas like a wide brim to a hat surrounding the entire structure, and everything painted a bright yellow trimmed with green, you never in this world would recognise 240 Main Street, once brown and square and ugly. There's a new stable a quarter of a mile back of the house; there are lawns where the vegetable garden used to be; the old apple orchard is now a sunken garden with a pool in the centre. As I write I can hear the trickle of a stream of water that spouts out of the little artificial pond, and catch the prosperous sound of the hum of a lawn-mower run by a motor. The name that Edith has chosen to give to all this grandeur is "The Homestead." It is engraved at the head of every sheet of note-paper in the establishment. The Homestead! You might as well call Windsor Castle the "Bide a Wee" or the "Dewdrop Inn" as this glaring, officious, stone-gated palace anything that suggests plainness and sweet homely comfort. The last time I wrote to Juliet I drew a big black ink line through the words "The Homestead" and wrote above "The Waldorf-Ritz-Plaza."
I've tried not to interfere with the changes Edith has made. I will confess I appealed to Alec about the apple orchard. But it was of no use. It seemed a shame to me, to go among that little company of old friends—twenty or thirty bent and bowing apple-trees grown up now side by side, touching branches and blooming together beautifully every spring just as if they were not far too old to bear anything to be called a harvest. I told Alec that I thought an apple orchard and a stone wall with poison ivy climbing over it was the loveliest garden for a New England homestead that any one could lay out. Alec must have told Edith, for the next day she asked me, in her laughing way, if I wouldn't like chickens scratching in the front yard, and yellow pumpkins piled on the back porch. New England homesteads even managed, she added, to keep pigs near enough the house so that the family could breathe the healthy odour in the parlour. "Dear child," she said, "of course we can't let the place be run over with poison ivy! How funny you are!" And the apple-trees came down. There are formal paths in the apple orchard now, the imported shrubs are tagged with labels, the pond is lined with cement. I simply have to escape to the woods, every once in a while, to make sure that nature is still having her way somewhere in the world.
You must think from this description that Edith Campbell is something of an heiress. Now that word to me has a kind of aristocratic sound, and so I prefer to say in regard to the Campbells, that they have simply oodles and oodles of money. I hate the word "oodles," but it just fits Edith Campbell. It describes her worldly possessions to a T. Her father, old Dave Campbell, is rolling up a fortune that is attracting attention. Why, the cost of all the improvements on old "two-forty" here didn't make a dent in his bank account they say. Alec tells me that if it wasn't for Mr. Campbell, Father's woollen business would not have endured another twelve months. Mr. Campbell has gone into the business heart and soul, and I don't know whether to be glad or sorry. Father never had any use at all for Mr. Campbell. He used to call him "scurvy." I remember the word because as a child I thought it a funny adjective to apply to a man who had a perfectly flawless complexion. I had to muster up all the control I had when I first saw David Campbell's big, fat, voluminous body occupying Father's revolving desk-chair in the private office down at the factory. I didn't think Father would like it. But Alec says that Father would much prefer to have Mr. Campbell elected as a president of the Vars & Company Woollen Mills than that any concern bearing his, Father's, name should fail to pay its creditors a hundred cents on the dollar. Perhaps he would; I don't know much about business. Anyhow I try to be nice to Mr. Campbell.
I try to be nice to Edith, too. It isn't easy. I don't like her, and I don't like her methods, but I don't tell her so. We don't quarrel, although we mix about like oil and water. Of course Edith has her good points. For instance she is the most generous person I ever knew, and she's good-nature itself. She'll take an insult from you, pay you back in your own coin and then exclaim: "Oh, come on, let's not fight. There's a dear! Let's go to the matinée this afternoon." She has a lot of practical ability too. She's a born manager, and as systematic as a machine. The trouble with Edith is her ambition. She wants to stand at the head of all society in the world, and to get there she is ready to work till she drops. Just as soon as she struggles up on top of one heap of people she begins on another, and so on. I don't know where she'll stop. Juliet Adams' mother told me that she could remember when people in Hilton didn't like to invite Mrs. Campbell to their houses. That was years ago, of course, for now they thank their lucky stars if they are invited to hers. There used to be, and are still, lots of beautiful country places sprinkled around Hilton. These summer people never mingled very much with Hiltonites, but as soon as Edith was able to walk she was bound to mingle with them. Well, she has realised that ambition. The summer colony, which is the set that gives social distinction to Hilton, includes Edith in all of its big functions now, in spite of the damning fact that she is a "native" and an "all-the-year-round."
Edith's social activities are simply marvellous to me. She has her plan of campaign—the various combinations of people to be invited to dinner-parties, bridges, or small teas, all mapped out and written down in a book at the beginning of each season. Then she manages to inveigle, by means of big fat cheques, I imagine, lions—pianists, and authors, and lecturers, whom everybody wants to see and hear—to act as her guest of honour. So her parties are always rather popular, you see. Oh, Edith is clever. She may not understand my nature very well, but to the likes and dislikes, pet ambitions and pleasures of human-nature generally she can cater to the queen's taste.
She has fairly hypnotised Ruth. My little sister thinks there is no one like her. As soon as Edith married Alec, she took complete possession of Ruth, provided her with a lot of lovely clothes and sent her off, for the first winter, to a fashionable boarding-school in New York. After eight dazzling months of that sort of life she ordained that Ruth should return to Hilton and "come out." Last fall she gave her a reception that fairly thrilled the town. Edith's word is sacred law to Ruth; Edith's opinion the ultimatum to any doubt on any question whatsoever. I am a mere speck on Ruth's outlook on life; my ideas don't count; I am so old-fashioned and so easily shocked; I don't know what style is; I don't possess a scrap of what Edith calls social-sense. Perhaps as much as anything else it is Edith's complete possession of Ruth that hurts me. It seems a shame that she couldn't have been satisfied with Alec. I don't see why she had to rob me of my only sister too. I don't cry about it (I won't let myself) but I think I've missed my own mother more since I was twenty than before I was ten. It may be a comfort to mothers whose little children have grown out of the helpless age to know this from a grown-up daughter.
I don't know what to say to you about my brother Alec. I wonder sometimes what has become of him. I see him, I hear him speak, I reply, but I might as well be gazing at his picture and talking with him over the long distance 'phone. I have no idea what he thinks about this new life of ours. He doesn't confide in me any more; we are almost strangers now. Of course I should expect him to be loyal to his wife—he's such a thoughtful man that he wouldn't hurt Edith's feelings for anything—but I wonder and wonder where all his old qualities have gone. Alec used to be so firm and determined, so frugal and economical. Are those qualities still smouldering away down deep in him somewhere, or when Edith took possession of his house, did she take possession of his soul too, and sweep out everything she didn't like, just as she cut off the cupola and sold the iron fence? Some men let women do that with them, especially if it's a woman they've wanted terribly for a dozen years, and never thought themselves good enough for her to accept. Why, Alec simply wants to please Edith and her family in every human way that he can. I have an idea that he feels so grateful to Edith for accepting him, and to Mr. Campbell for saving the business, that he doesn't dare disagree with a single solitary thing the Campbells ever do or think or suggest. I believe my brother is so overcome by living in such continual grandeur, sleeping in a bed with gold trimmings—Napoleonic, Edith says—bathing in a bathroom with Florentine tiles, entertaining all the big bugs within a hundred miles, and travelling to the office every morning in a limousine, that he feels that he must have been a mere worm when Edith picked him up. I think he's more of a worm now! Anyhow he doesn't show any backbone.
Sometimes at the table I glance at him across the flowers, and once in a long, long while there's a look in his eyes when they meet mine that I recognise as my dear brother's. Usually it's when Ruth and Edith are discussing society; and after one of these clandestine meetings of Alec's and mine across the flowers, I always come up here to my room wonderfully comforted, with a feeling that I am not absolutely deserted, after all.
Perhaps that sounds as if I were unhappy. Please do not think so, because I'm not. I'm bound not to be. I should be ashamed of myself, if just because I happened to be ousted from my job and didn't fancy my successor, I simply "went out into the back yard and ate worms." That isn't what I'm doing at all. Once Alec was married and I had made up my mind that I couldn't run away to New York and earn my way, or hire a house of my own and live by myself, I buckled down and did my level best to adjust my likes and habits to the conditions of Edith's reign. One can get used to anything, I believe. I accepted Edith as a person ought to accept any circumstance that can't be avoided. What if her ambitions do seem to me unworthy? What if she has crowded me out of my little niche? What if the customs and the things I liked are desecrated before my very eyes? All this will not cripple me, as a chance railroad accident might. I'm not enduring physical torture. I can still see, and hear, and use my two unhampered feet for long sweet walks in the country. What if, indeed, Edith has robbed me of Alec, and Ruth too? She cannot rob me of the joys of out-of-doors, the messages to me in books, the thrill I feel at the sound of distant music.
I can generally find several hours every day when I am able to steal away somewhere by myself with a book. I never had much time to read when I was younger and no one to suggest and guide as I grew up. I had never read Vanity Fair even, nor Silas Marner, nor David Copperfield. So after Alec was married, I made it my task to catch up with other girls of my age. I have my nose buried inside a novel most all of the time now. At first I used to drive myself to it, allot myself a certain number of chapters to read each day and accomplish it as if it were a stint. Now I simply devour a book in great hungry bites and wish there were more when I am finished. I don't know what I should do if I hadn't learned to love to read. I wonder if it would open up other sources of joy if I should learn to appreciate symphony or Italian Art. Perhaps Beethoven and Leonardo da Vinci, mere names to me now, would become as individual and inspire me with their messages as deeply as dear old Stevenson, whom I couldn't live without.
I think you must have surmised by this time that I haven't proved a great belle in society. You're exactly right. In the first place I hate bridge! Whenever I attempt to play, I get hot all over, and I wish I could unhook my tight collar and roll up my prickly sleeves. When it comes my turn to play, and I find myself desperately at a loss to know whether to trump or not—my partner looking daggers at me across the table and everybody waiting in dead silence—I simply give up all responsibility in the matter, repeat to myself: "Eenie, meenie, mynie moe, Catch a nigger by the toe," etc., and fling down the card that's "it," in utter abandon. Of course, that isn't good bridge, and Edith says I'll never make a player. She says I don't possess any more card-sense than social-sense. I wonder what kind of sense I do possess anyhow! It was a big consolation when I learned that the emptiest-headed women often make the best card players, simply because no superfluous ideas are at work in their brains to interrupt the train of concentrated card thought.
I'm not much more successful in conversation than I am in bridge. I seem to be always on the outside of women's intimacies somehow. Edith's set know one another so confidentially—keep tabs on the gowns, the hats, the jewellery, the number of servants each one has, and guess at one another's incomes. And then they use such a lot of mysterious signs! Sometimes raised eyebrows, a little nod toward a person's back, very tightly pursed lips, somebody abruptly twirling her two thumbs, will set off a whole roomful into peals of laughter, while I simply sit dazed and blank. It's just so with Ruth's younger crowd too. They're always giggling or making unintelligible remarks. You see I'm a kind of an in-between age, not old enough for Edith's set, nor young enough for Ruth's. The girls I used to know in the high school have not proved to be of the fashionable society here in Hilton, and Edith won't let me have them at the house. I've drifted away from most of them, except Juliet Adams, who is doing settlement work in New York, and I can't find any one to take their place.
I've come to the sad conclusion that I'm not popular with men either. At the little dances given here in Hilton occasionally, I'm not a wall-flower, possibly because I'm Edith Vars' sister-in-law, but I'm never "rushed." I can't be very brilliant in conversation at a dance when I'm anxiously watching for some kind, charitable soul to deliver my partner from the fear of two numbers in succession with me. And I have a sneaking conviction that I don't dance very well. You see all Ruth's set "Boston" to a waltz and two-step, and I don't know how. When a man is good enough to ask me to dance it seems too bad to make him exercise until he perspires. No one knows that I don't enjoy dances very much. It looks as if I were having a good time, I suppose, but down in my heart I'm worried and afraid.
At first I used to be eagerly on the lookout for my ideal—for a fleeting glimpse of a face that resembled the picture locked away in my secret desk-drawer. But such a quest is mere nonsense. I go to Boston to shop with Edith quite often; but never, in all the trains, railroad stations, restaurants, or elevators in law-office buildings (where one runs across so many good-looking men) have I seen even once the face of my desire. Why, I searched for that face throughout Oliver's and Malcolm's entire class when they graduated from college; I look for it among the new young men that come to call on Ruth, but I can't find it. Yet if I ever do marry, the man must be born by this time, I suppose. Sometimes, especially when I listen to music, I wonder where he is, in just what city, what house, what room he is sitting at that particular moment. I smile to think how unconscious he is of me, who some day will fill his life completely, and how surprised he'd be if he knew that I was loving him even now.
I wonder what he's doing this very minute—three o'clock on a Saturday afternoon. Perhaps he's playing golf in a Norfolk Scotch tweed; perhaps he's oiling an engine in blue overalls; perhaps he's at the point of death with typhoid fever and is lying in bed with a thermometer in his mouth, and I am going to lose him! Oh, I hope he will be spared! I'll love him, overalls and all, and be proud too, to stand at the back-door and wave my apron when his train goes by, just as they do in magazine stories. I don't believe, after all, I'm a bit ambitious when it comes to marrying.
I suppose every reader of this résumé chapter of mine is simply skipping paragraphs by the dozen in the fond hope that he'll run across some exciting reference to Dr. Maynard. People are always so suspicious of an old love-affair. Let me relieve your mind. As much as you may be disappointed, I must announce that I am not reserving any sweet sentimental morsel, for a climactic finale. Far from it. I haven't got it to reserve. I only wish I had. A sweet memory is such a comforting possession, a thrilling romance of the past such a reassurance. But it is very evident that Dr. Maynard has no intention of providing me with sweet memories or thrilling romances. All the balm and comfort that his proposal may have given me in the beginning he has destroyed by being hopelessly commonplace ever since. I wish you could read his letters! Impersonal? Why, they might easily be addressed to a maiden aunt. Never once has he referred to that starry night, when he asked me to go to Germany with him; never intimated that he wished that I were there to see the castles on the Rhine, or hear the music in the gardens above Heidelberg; never asked, as any normal man would do, if I had changed my mind. Not that I have in the least. I haven't! Only it seems to me almost impolite not as much as to inquire.
Dr. William Ford Maynard is becoming quite well known here in America. There have been several articles already in the magazines about him and the remarkable results of his scientific research. I ought to be flattered to receive envelopes addressed to me from him at all, I suppose. We write about once a month. His letters are full of descriptions of pensions, and cafés, and queer people at his boarding-place. I know some of his guinea-pigs by name—the ones who have the typhoid, the scarlet-fever, and the spinal meningitis; the convalescents, the fatalities, and the triumphant recoveries are reported to me monthly. But as honoured as I ought to feel, I suppose, to share the results of this man's famous work, the truth is I don't enjoy his letters one bit! I am glad I was foresighted enough not to marry such a passionless man. I never would have been satisfied. I see it clearly now.
My letters to him are regular works of art. I'm bound not to let him pity me, at any rate, and if he can write cheerful and enthusiastic descriptions so can I. To Dr. Maynard I am simply delighted over our burst into prosperity and social splendour. Edith's improvements on the house I rave over. I describe bridge parties, teas and dances as if I gloried in them. I refer to various men—mostly Ruth's suitors, I must confess—frequently and with familiarity. I am simply "Living," with a big capital L, in my letters to Dr. Maynard, and my stub pen crosses its T's and ends its sentences with great broad, militant dashes that are bold with triumph.
Once only did Dr. Maynard condescend to refer to the past, and that was in a little insignificant postscript at the end of a long humorous description of a German family that he saw in a café. This is what he wrote, all cramped up in a little bit of space, after he had signed his name:
"How is San Francisco progressing in her reconstruction? Does she need any outside help in building up her beautiful city? Please let me know when she does!"
I tell you I wrote him the gayest, most flippant little note I could compose—all about how busy I was with engagements, etc., etc.; and then after I had signed my name, along the margin of the paper I said:
"About San Francisco—she is progressing wonderfully, she doesn't need any help from any one, unless possibly lead weights to keep her from soaring. The earthquake did her good. She's becoming very modernised and when you see her next I doubt if you recognise her on account of all the changes. Is Lizzie better? Or was it Nibbles who had the typhoid?"
If Dr. Maynard couldn't afford a fresh sheet of paper, go upstairs and shut himself in his room, and ask me seriously and quietly if I were unhappy or lonely, I would starve first before I'd ask bread of him.
I have it all planned just how I shall treat Dr. Maynard when he comes home—very distantly and as if so much society had made me a little blasé. When his name is sent up I shall keep him waiting in the little gold reception-room for about five minutes, and then glide into his presence, in a long clinging crêpe-de-chine dress. After I have shaken hands and said, "How pleasant it is to have you with us again," I'll ring for tea, then go back and sit down in the carved Italian armchair with the high back, dangle the ivory paper-cutter in one hand the way Ruth does, and inquire what sort of a passage he has had.
If he should come this year I've just the gown to wear. It's black, with a gold cord around the waist. I look about twenty-nine in it, and awfully sophisticated.