Far from the Maddening Girls/Chapter 6

by Guy Wetmore Carryl

CHAPTER SIX

“At length, after many unsuccessful efforts to surmount the wall. Master Reynard turned away.

“‘I had never much of a fancy for grapes,’ said he, ‘and, moreover, these grapes are far from ripe.’”

He was several kinds of a humbug, was the fabulist’s fox, but not, among them, of that most unconscionable variety which puts down such remarks as the above in writing. The distinction is one, which, however reluctantly I say it, I cannot claim for myself. For the entire history of “Sans Souci,” as it appears in the foregoing pages, seems to me to be nothing more than an elaboration of Master Reynard’s casuistry.

There will have been, incidental to the childhood of us all, certain odds and ends of costume which lent a vivid colour to such roles of our assumption as Kidd or Crusoe. We will not have seen these properties for years; but in our memories they stand out, against the background of the merely commonplace, as the insignia of a pomp and circumstance which has retained something of its ingenuous splendour through all the sordid course of later experience. In them arrayed, we paced the decks of pirate ships, were cast ashore on cannibal-infested isles, and trod in battle, blood, and booty, beyond the imaginings of a Stevenson or a Poe. Surely, it is not strange that, in our fancy, the accessories to these enchantments should be as eloquent to-day as in our first decade.

But there comes the day when the fond delusion crumbles about our ears to piteous ruin. We have found, in some long-closed chest, these props to infant imagery, and, with that sudden contraction of heart which is peculiar to unexpected contact with the past, recognize them for what they are — some yards of scarlet cloth, scraps of tinsel and gold embroidery, a pair or two of tarnished epaulets, a sword without a scabbard, a dozen mock orders from some cotillon long since danced and done with — the playthings of the dwarfs we were. Ah me, how potent once they were! Now, all the most fanciful of us can do is pay them that trifling tribute. Their usefulness, even their charm, is gone forever. They are such stuff as dreams are made of, invalid, tawdry, and small, small, small, incomparably small!

But this is the work of years. It is only the children of our brains — ideas, ideals, opinions — which change so pitifully in a few short weeks that we may not even regard them with that tender regret wherewith we view the panoply of infancy, but instinctively draw back, and, if conscience did not stand sternly sponsor for them, would deny them for our own.

Far from the maddening girls!

Six weeks have passed since, with easy complacency, I closed the foregoing pages with those words, and to-day, for all the pride I have in them, they might be only hideous changelings in the cradle of my manuscript. But let them lie. Poor things, it is all they can do now!

In what manner the scales fell from my eyes I cannot pretend to say. It was a miracle like a bird’s first flight, sunrise, or the opening of a rose. The soul of me drew away, and stared with amazed contempt at the little shell of sophistry in which it had been imprisoned. The flimsy edifice of bachelor philosophy came toppling down like any house of cards: and all I have here written of “Sans Souci” turned in a moment to the veriest trash. It was the work of a night; of the night, indeed, which followed the day on which I closed these notes.

But from the day, almost from the hour, when I received Miss Berrith’s letter of farewell, I took no further pleasure in my celibacy or my home. Any attempt to do so, even in my own mind, I knew to be pure bravado. In the first place, “Sans Souci” was ridiculously large. As I sat in a corner of my den, occupying some twelve cubic feet of space, the long corridor and the other rooms reproached me with their superfluity of accommodation. As a boy, it had been my opinion that I could never have a sufficiency of watermelon. I still remember, with a sense of loathing, the occasion when I matched my appetite against a whole one. To this day, I view that fruit with an emotion akin to that which the sight of his monster must have inspired in the breast of Frankenstein, an emotion which now returned to me as I contemplated the too ample proportions of “Sans Souci.” In the homely phrase, I had bitten off more than I could chew.

Again, I saw in my position an analogy to that of the despicable drone in the busy hive. Darius, with his shoe-brushes and his rake, Galvin at her wash-tub, the tradesmen who came and went — these were the workers. All I was good for was to eat and buzz complacently over the advantages of celibacy. But, at a certain point in the history of the hive, the exasperated workers fall upon the drones and hustle them unceremoniously out of doors. Did I deserve a better fate?

Most of all, I was lonely; with such a loneliness as I cannot endeavour to describe. Struggle as I would against it, the remembrance forced itself upon me of the hours I had spent in Miss Berrith’s company, of her quick wit, of her breezy candour, of the cheerful love of life and the gentle womanly sympathy which I now saw only too clearly had illumined all her moods, and which I had so pitifully failed to understand. Little by little, a realization of what this mental attitude must signify forced itself upon my comprehension. I shied at the word itself like a horse at something seen dimly in the dark, but it was not to be denied. Letter by letter, it mastered me, as if I had been a child playing with alphabetical blocks, until I came to know its form and meaning in something after the following manner:

L is for Loneliness, bitter and blue;
That, sir, is what is the matter with you.
O is for One, and, experience taught of,
Now you can see that is all you have thought of.
V is for Vanity. You have your share:
Yes, and a generous portion to spare.
E is for Egotist. Proof there is ample
That you needn’t look far if you’re seeking a sample.

Each letter thus taught me a humiliating lesson, but when I came to string them together I learned the greatest lesson of all.

Yes, I was in love. I had as soon looked to find that confession in these pages as to receive Leviathan in the living-room of “Sans Souci”; but once the fact had established itself in my conviction, it remained there, as immovable as Plymouth Rock.

It was as if some one — Dan Cupid, for preference — had dropped a bomb into the peaceful hamlet of my philosophy. The roofs which sheltered my pet notions flew in flinders, and the notions themselves rushed screaming into the streets, rending their garments and calling upon Heaven to pardon them their sins. The municipal authorities, Messrs. Obstinacy, Selfishness, Conceit, and Company, resigned their offices upon the spot, and Major-General Humility put the town under martial law.

This matter of love is a singular thing enough, as experienced by a man. First of all, it bowls over his confidence, the very quality of which he would seem to be in the most urgent need; and then, in a manner nothing short of gross, turns its attention to demoralizing his purely material faculties. My appetite vanished like the flame of a candle under a wet sponge; and as for any desire for sleep, I would have made the most efficient night-watchman in existence. I did not fall into the dismal custom of writing verse; and the isolation of my life secured me against the crowning folly of discoursing to my friends on the key of tit-willow and alackaday; but in all other respects I suppose mine was as typical a case of love-sickness as you would be apt to find.

Your practised poultryman will tell you which eggs will hatch and which will not, and it is probably by some such occult faculty as this that the average woman is able to detect the incubation of the tender passion. As I look back, I perceive that Galvin must have been fully aware of my condition, and that she encouraged it to the full extent of her ability, though at the time I could think of no reason for the persistent manner in which she forced the subject of matrimony upon my attention. Almost daily now, she brought up for my consideration some domestic problem which clearly called for the exercise of feminine judgment, and then, after watching me with a kind of pity as I wrestled with it, she would retire, with a hint, more or less gentle, as to the ease with which such reefs and shallows were passed around or over, when a mistress held the domestic helm. I was called upon for an opinion as to the advisability of using kerosene upon the dining-table; I was expected to give a verdict in favour of one or another of a dozen washing preparations; I had to sit in judgment upon the respective merits of tar-paper and camphor as a preservative of winter clothes; I was asked to determine whether or not the washerwoman had employed an acid on my shirts, whether chamois-skin or cheese-cloth was best for the piano, whether an egg-shell improved the coffee, and a host of similar whethers-or-not, which might as readily have been rebuses in Sanskrit for all the impression they conveyed to my mind.

“I can’t abide to trouble you,” the Machiavellian Galvin would observe. “If you was a married man, Mr. Sands, there’d be no need— but of course — ”

And the door would close upon this incomplete, yet eloquent, remark, leaving me, each time, more shaken in my resolution than before. The Galvin octagon was complete at last, and its eighth side was match-manufactural!

Thus beset, exteriorly by a subtle system of suggestion ever crescent in its effect, and interiorly by an obsession which I had even less will than power to control, I saw, more and more clearly, what the inevitable outcome of my plight must be. Already the currents had swept my bark into the rapids. The roar of the cataract was in my ears. It remained to be seen in what manner I should contrive to pass it; whether triumphantly, to emerge presently upon the serener waters of married life, or disastrously, and, as on the former occasion, swamped by pitiless waves of rejection and contempt.

At this point the main thread of my reflections was snapped by the inopportune defection of Darius. At first I did not realize the extent of my catastrophe, but viewed his failure to appear, not only on one morning, but on three mornings following, in the light of an opportunity. The weather had been wet, and I know not which was most in need, my shoes of blacking, or my grass of mowing. Plainly, it was my duty to undertake both tasks, and I girded myself for the dual ordeal with an idea that I was about to establish a precedent of efficiency by which it should be the difficult duty of Darius to shape his subsequent performances.

I had never tried a lawn-mower before. I think I never shall again. There is something in one of our minor poets about “the drops of dew which cling, impearled, tenacious, to the grass.” I am like Lady Teazle, in a position to show that “there is not one syllable of truth in what the gentleman has told you.” Drops of dew do not cling, tenacious, to the grass. On the contrary, they vanish, surreptitiously, between the clippers of the lawn-mower, abide briefly in the mechanism thereof, climb unknowably up the handle, percolate with incredible celerity through the human system, and presently emerge, as large as life and twice as significant, upon the human brow. I had not mowed twenty square feet of lawn before I was filled with a vast sense of respect for the prowess of Darius Doane. Nothing could have induced me to drive that Juggernaut another foot.

But if this was the lesson taught me by the lawn-mower, how much greater was the moral imparted by the shoe-brushes and the blacking. I do not remember ever having tested my ability in this direction before. A vague impression of the tactics employed by certain Tuscan gentlemen on city street-corners was all I had to go by. Their first act is to knock the backs of the brushes together. I did that. The crowning feature of the ceremony is to lean over, with your mouth wide open, an inch from the shoe, and then say “Ha-a-a-a-a!” as you do when the doctor has the handle of the teaspoon down your throat, looking for tonsilitis. I did that. Between the two, I brushed with unexampled energy, and for one brief moment saw my efforts crowned with triumph. A tiny spot of brilliance appeared on the extreme tip of one shoe, and then abruptly vanished. That was the sole symptom of success. I laboured for full an hour longer, without inducing anything more than a sulky dullness, and then I gave it up. Not that I was to blame. If the stove-polish had been kept in a proper place, there would have been no chance of my confusing it with the blacking.

If it was with an added respect for the services of Darius that I emerged from this experience, it was, as well, with a multiplied need of them. But nearly a week elapsed before his absence was explained by the following letter from his mother:

“Dear Sir:

“Darius is layed up with a Decease which is Information of the Longs is very woorit for fear you will not kep his Job for him tole him You would Doctor says not in danjer and will be able to resum Work in abt ten Days.

“Respetfully yours

“Agatha Doane.”

That afternoon I set off to make a call upon Darius.

We were well into November, but something remained of the warm languor of Indian summer which was in alluring contrast to the wonted bleakness of the month. The leaves had clung to their places with a singular tenacity, and, perhaps for this very cause, were more vividly and variably coloured than I had ever seen them. A blue haze from brush-fires somewhere in the distance filtered through the woods, blurring the vistas to an appearance of being slightly out of focus which charmed the eye with an incomparable softness, and stinging the nostrils not unpleasantly with its acrid pungency. Spring is the season of silence. She stands tip-toed and finger on lip, breathlessly awaiting the miracle of resurrection. But autumn is all haste and anxious preparation against the threatening peril of the snows. This floor of dry leaves, levelly laid, and polished, each of them, as if their surfaces had been of fawn lacquer, was the canopy over an infinity of unseen and intermingling thoroughfares, through which the tiny denizens of the world of under-foot scuttled nimbly about their affairs, unapparent to my coarser perception, save in that, as I stood still, news of their activities came to me in the form of the faintest imaginable rustle. Larger, though no less timid, creatures sped away at my approach, across this crackling carpet — squirrels, sitting up at a safe distance to survey me, with their forepaws held coquettishly against their breasts: rabbits, pausing for a single glance at the intruder, and then whipping out of sight among the brush: partridges, rushing for a few paces over the leaves, and then whirring upward like rising rockets.

I have said intruder, for such, as I walked, I felt myself to be. I cannot particularize the sense of isolation which touched me, further than to say that in a world of activity and varied interest I alone was idle and ill-content. I can only hope that the feeling is one which others have shared, for there is no describing or explaining it. It comes upon you out of nothingness, and presently is gone again, unsatisfied. For the life of you you cannot tell what thing it is you crave, but more than life you crave it!

Albeit I had started with a definite end in view, this so alluring afternoon had tempted me more than once from the direct way, so that I had taken small notice of my actual progress, until, coming suddenly out upon the road again after my fourth or fifth deflection, I found myself almost opposite the Berrith house. Miss Susie Berrith, in a smart little walking costume, indescribably taking by reason of its brisk masculine note, was coming down the path. We were face to face before either could catch a breath. She would have passed me with a bow, but I stopped her.

“We seem to be going the same way,” said I, and after she had given me some little formal expression of acquiescence we fell in step.

“I don’t know what you will have been thinking of me,” I ventured to observe, and vastly envied the ease of her laugh as she replied:

“Are you sure I have been thinking of you at all?”

“Oh, Miss Berrith,” I exclaimed, “I think I am the most blundering, the most inept, the most selfish, and the most inconsiderate of men! I wish I could convey to you an adequate sense of the humiliation with which I look back upon almost every detail of our acquaintance. If I had seen a man treating a dog with the brutality of which I have been guilty to you, I think I should have sailed in and thrashed him, if only to satisfy my sense of decency.”

“Please don’t, Mr. Sands,” said she. “I — I think I understand.”

“It isn’t only that,” I continued obstinately. “It’s the knowledge that my lamentable blindness, my crass ignorance, and my utter stupidity, have put forever out of my reach the only thing in the world which — “

I might have expected the result. Miss Berrith drew away, crossing to the other side of the road.

“Please, Mr. Sands!” she repeated. “There can be no use in this, no use at all, and such a discussion must be as painful to you as it surely is to me.”

“Then I am right?” I persisted. “I have thrown away my chance?”

Miss Berrith made no reply.

“Isn’t that the plain truth of it?” I asked.

“You force me into being so unpleasant as to say it is,” she answered. “I am sorry to hurt your feelings, but — but women are not won that way, Mr. Sands. You did not like it when I once said I thought you were pathetic, but that is how you seemed to me. You have been doing your best all along to rub the bloom off life for yourself, and turn your back upon the essence of it, and in the attempt it would be strange if you did not rush in to some places where angels fear to tread. That you were all alone, and endeavouring to make a few cut-and-dried opinions on the advantages of celibacy take the place of all the greatest and most beautiful realities of life —wasn’t that pathetic? I was very far from wanting to marry you, Mr. Sands, but had I been ever so anxious, the manner of your offer would have cured me. What was it you brought to me? Was it a poor, weak-kneed imitation of a manly avowal, or was it the strong, unselfish love of a good man for a good woman? Oh, you have yet to learn that in all the world there is nothing greater than that — “

“Except,” I interposed, “the love of a woman for a man. That is infinitely greater, so much greater, indeed, that, where the other is only a miracle, this is a worker of miracles. It pardons him his faults and, in pardoning, often cures them.”

Then there was silence between us, until we came to the first houses of the town. Here Miss Berrith paused upon a corner.

“Now I must leave you,” she said. “I am going to see Darius.”

“Why, bless my soul!” I exclaimed, “so am I! I had forgotten all about it. Do you mind if I come with you?”

“I shall be glad,” she answered simply, and we went on again.

Mrs. Doane met us at the door. She was a stout, shapeless woman, who would have been ridiculous if she had not been crying. The most singular little pang I have ever experienced went through me at sight of her strained, blue eyes, even now shining full of tears.

“Oh, dear heart. Miss Berrith,” she began at once, after a little bow to me, “the boy’s that sick! The doctor says — oh, Miss Berrith, dear — ”

Miss Berrith seemed to understand the whole matter from these few words. She went directly to Mrs. Doane, and put her arms around her, and her lips against her cheek, and spoke to her as if the poor creature had been a frightened child.

“There — there — there — there.”

It was the most gentle, the most tactful, and the most touching thing, that ever even a woman did, and the beauty of it swelled in my throat like a sob.

“Last night he turned worse,” said Mrs. Doane, “and talked that wild! It was all about you, Miss Berrith, dear — about you and Mr. Sands — gettin’ married. Ain’t it funny he should have his heart set on a thing like that? But he has.”

I caught my breath, looking for a protest from Miss Berrith, but, to my amazement, she did not seem to have heard the words at all. She only held Mrs. Doane closer, and continued her little soothing murmur.

Then I found myself mechanically following them to the sick-room, and, a moment later, at the bedside of Darius, with the solemnity upon me that even a hint of death inspires.

SHE WENT DIRECTLY TO MRS. DOANE, AND PUT HER ARMS AROUND HER

In the midst of the large, old-fashioned four-poster, the boy looked as little as a baby. His face was very white and drawn, and his eyes were closed. On a low chair at his side was seated the village doctor, with his fingers on the thin wrist which lay outside the coverlet. He looked up as we entered, nodded to Miss Berrith, and at once turned his eyes back to Darius. This suggestion of acute attention was, to my way of thinking, more eloquent than any form of words.

And Darius — oh, Darius!

Every act and every word of his flashed back upon me, as I saw him lying there, so thin and small — the unspeakable mouth-organ, the disarming smile, the lines of “The Skeleton in Armor,” the sound of his rake upon the gravel and of his briskly-plied brushes in the cellar underneath my den, the morning of his coming, that of his dismissal, that of his return. Oh, happy, chattering, rattle-pated, little, dear Darius! Was this, indeed, the Valley of the Shadow?

Slowly his eyes unclosed, and then, as they rested on the face of Susie Berrith, the ghost of his old smile woke upon his lips, and he sighed, with the essence of content.

“Miss Berrit’,” he said in a whisper like an elf’s, “an’ Mist’ San’s. Den I wasn’t dereamin’. Y’ are a-goin’ to git marrit, after orl?”

As the words left his lips, the doctor looked straight across at Susie Berrith, and sharply nodded!

There was the briefest imaginable pause, and then the girl bent down and kissed Darius on the lips.

“Yes, Darius,” she answered steadily. “Yes, dear, I am going to marry Mr. Sands!”

“God bless you!” said the doctor softly.

He knew it was a lie!

As we waited outside the house for his verdict, I could no more have spoken to her than to the Madonna upon an altar. When, at last, he came to us with word that the boy would live, we turned home together, still in silence.

The air had gone suddenly chill and supremely clear. The gold of the declining sun splashed through the openings between the trees, and fell in a marvellous mosaic on the windings of the familiar road. The world was as still as some vast chapel.

“I love you more than the very breath of life itself,” said I, as steadily as I could for the beating of my heart. “Will you marry me?”

She turned sharply at the words, with her head thrown back and her cheeks blazing.

“Oh, is that kind?” she cried. “Is it fair? Is it possible you didn’t understand what it might have meant to have given him a different answer? And you would take advantage — oh, shame! You would take advantage of — of my lie!”

“Oh, my dearest,” I broke in, “it was too beautiful to be a lie. It was truth for Darius. Will you not make it truth for me?”

And I held out my arms to her.

*****

A hundred and ninety years later, or seven minutes — I forget which — I made a confession.

“I should tell you,” said I, “that I have been so silly as to write down all my idiotic ideas on housekeeping, celibacy, matrimony, and the like, in the form of a sort of story. I shall add one more chapter—this chapter, dearest—just by way of salving my conscience, and then commit the whole rigmarole to the flames which it deserves.”

She could not forget to contradict me—the witch!

“On the contrary,” said she, “you will add your one more chapter, and then get the editor of a discriminating periodical to publish the whole affair for you. Don’t you see, John? It may be the means of showing other confirmed bachelors the perils of darkest celibacy.”

“And the way out!” said I.

I wonder if it will.

 

THE END

 

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THE McCLURE PRESS, NEW YORK