Peyson's Paint Lady

by Zona Gale and Jill Menkey

Peyson's Paint Lady

By ZONA GALE and JILL MENKEY

“AREN'T the magazine advertisements in these days simply wonderful?” Mrs. Briller, with her charming air of candor, propounded.

“Amazingly good,” said Berkeley.

“So original—such pains taken to make them artistic—such pretty girls to pose for the pictures,” Mrs. Briller went on contentedly. Give Mrs. Briller leave to continue her subject and she always passed it around like bonbons, convinced that every one was pleased. “I always look the advertisements through just as much as I do the magazine matter,” she continued, with a kind of pride.

Berkeley, from his neighboring porch-chair, groaned; not really groaned, perhaps, but he thought of a groan—just as one will who is mentally overburdened in public.

“I suppose,” Berkeley said to his attentive self, “that I have heard ten thousand people say that thing, just precisely as if they had invented the idea.”

Whereupon he smiled assent at Mrs. Briller, for Mrs. Briller demanded a smile at every noun. Then he turned over the advertising pages of his own magazine.

“Here they all are, bless 'em,” he said meditatively. “Floor-stain and gelatin and reasons why and refrigerators and diamonds and squabs and gramophones and motors and motors, and then motors and paints——”

Berkeley stopped talking and turned back a page.

“What a wonderful girl!” he thought, and said nothing, holding the magazine open on his knee.

The paint advertisement took up two pages and it was colored. There was a picture of a pail of paint, reasons why one should buy it, and a cut of a brown house in a tropical country where sun, wind, and insects had no effect upon the paint; and there were letters from people in polar latitudes telling how snow and ice did nothing but bring out the tints. But the picture in the center—the picture in the center was the thing. There was a line of veranda-rail with pillars and three white steps. And at the top of the steps was a girl in blue linen. Her hair went back from her face, and her eyes were smiling, and she stood with her arms so folded that a hand touched either elbow where the blue sleeve stopped. Over her head was an orange-and-canary label which said: “Peyson's Paints. Best on Earth.”

“What a wonderful girl!” Berkeley said aloud.

Mrs. Briller did not look. She had found an automobile advertisement, with a cut of a new model, and she was entranced by the color of the cushions. But this did not prevent her from saying “Yes?” critically, for she criticized prettily as often as she laughed—at every noun.

“But I don't see,” offered Berkeley idly—his finger marking the place of that two-page advertisement—“I don't see where they get such stunning girls for the advertisements. They all look like something out of a frieze, with the gowns of a Broadway first night. If they are all such ravin' princesses as they look, how do they come to pose at all?”

Berkeley pondered it. This girl now—how had she come to pose? She looked as if a hundred belted earls were in their graves to account for her. Why should she have posed for an advertisement of paints made by one Peyson?

“What a droll thing it would be,” said Mrs. Briller abruptly, for, if she could, Mrs. Briller would have looked for romance between the very hands of the clock, “what a droll thing it would be to fall in love with a girl in a picture!”

Berkeley reflected.

“I wouldn't mind that so much,” he said; “that would be rather a joke, wouldn't it? But what would matter would be the way one actually met her. I hope to heaven,” said Berkeley earnestly, “that when I meet my future wife they'll hang out a star or two, and a blazing moon, and give a cue to a nightingale.”

Mrs. Briller looked at him curiously.

“What a charming sentimentalist you are!” she offered vaguely;“and do let me see the girl in the picture. What does she advertise?”

Berkeley promptly lost the place in the pages.

“I have forgotten all about her,” he declared, smiling in Mrs. Briller's eyes as the others strolled out for tea.

But he had not forgotten. On the contrary, he remembered more than once in the two days that remained to Mrs. Briller's house-party. He took the magazine to his room and laid it face downward among his brushes, and from time to time he looked casually at the picture of the girl in blue linen and reflected how delightful it would be if improbable things were not so uncompromisingly impossible. For in some way that picture haunted him. He looked to see where Peyson's paints were manufactured, and he turned it over in his mind that a man might go to Reed's Hollow, where the plant was, and look about a bit, and no one be the wiser.

“Gad!” he said to himself in scorn, on the afternoon of the second day, “I'll be putting on silver armor next, and appearing at the door of the paint-works.”

And on the afternoon of the second day something happened; something which transformed Mrs. Briller's house-party into what she flutteringly called a surprise-party. For Cardle, her brother, cruising up the Sound, dropped anchor where a nose of the Briller estate ran down to the water. He came ashore, and appearing among them on the veranda at tea, invited every one to come aboard the Mer-boat with him for three days. No one thought of refusing, and in two hours they were on the way.

Cardle greeted Berkeley with effusion, and as they all streamed across the fields in the sunset—they were to dine on the yacht—he elected to walk beside him and to tell him how many matters stood. Cardle was huge in his flannels, and he always said: “Surely you knew that? I must have talked with you about it before. I always talk about that.”

“I'm jolly glad to get you on the yacht, Berkeley,” he told him now; “I've done my best to get you before, you know. I've tried to get you down to our place in the summer too, haven't I? I'm not so crazy about the boat myself, but my wife is, and we like a jolly crowd. There's only my wife and my niece aboard now—and two more. But the two are engaged and you can count 'em out. They'd like it.”

Berkeley tried to remember. He had not known that Cardle had a niece. It was very remiss of him not to know; but then, he reflected, tramping through the long meadow-grass, there were so many things he didn't know. He could not even remember where Cardle's summer-place was. He looked across the meadows, gloriously smitten by light from the cloud-piled sky, and it came to him suddenly that he world give much to he crossing that meadow at that minute to meet somebody in blue linen, coming toward him with her arms so folded that a hand touched either elbow where the blue sleeve stopped. It smote him with a kind of giddiness than here was the meadow, and here was he himself, and somewhere in the world was the girl in the blue linen gown, and all that he dreamed was possible.

Cardle was talking on.

“I tell you what,” he said, “I wouldn't give one car for four yachts. Talk about repairing a car—why, I've laid out enough on that Mer-boat to bury her with full military honors. I've just had her painted again—that's the only luxury I can really afford."

“Painted,” repeated Berkeley, with his flattering attention. "Painted," he said again, with an associative image of a two-page paint advertisement, colored. “By the way,” Berkeley asked—not that he really wanted to know, but the question amused him—“by the way, what paint did you use?”

“Paint?” repeated Cardle.

Berkeley nodded, as interested as it he were about to select a new coat for the heavens.

“Why, I used Peyson's,” said Cardle, in a kind of surprise.

Berkeley was frankly startled. It was so absurd, as if the meadows and the cloud-piled sky had known of his late wish, and had granted him to approach near the subject of his lady!

“Let me tell you,” said Cardle, swinging ahead, “that that's the finest sun-proof paint in the country. If I'm not mistaken the Milky Way will be touched up with Peyson's enamel before the season is over, if I do say it. You know of course that I'm indirectly interested there?”

“Interested?” said Berkeley.

“Yes—in 'Peyson's Paints, the Best on Earth.' Haven't I told you that?” asked Cardle. “I must have talked with you about that before. I always talk with everybody about that.”

Berkeley put it to himself whether this coincidence really meant something—as coincidences seldom do. Then from the group ahead he heard Mrs. Briller sending back to him a little shriek of appeal—musical and melancholy.

“Don,” she cried, “oh, Don Berkeley! I've done the most frightful thing. I've invited a man to dinner, and in the excitement we've come off and left him. He will be at the house any minute—oh, would you go back to the lodge and telephone him to follow us here? And we'll simply have to wait for him.”

“Why, yes, Mrs. Briller,” said Berkeley, “yes. Has—has he a name?”

“His name,” said Mrs. Briller in worried abstraction, “is Hoppleton. Thank you so very much, Don.”

Hoppleton. Berkeley said the name over as he turned and faced once more the glory of the wide, gray-green meadows. and why in the world should he, he wondered idly, be roving across a strange pasture, intent on one Hoppleton, of whom he had never heard? He vaulted a fence and struck through the long, lush grass, starred with midsummer bloom, and his eye swept the held as far as the distant stile by the barberry-bushes, beyond which lay the lodge of Briller Place. Here was this meadow, gold in the light of the cloud-piled sky; and somewhere in the world was the girl of that picture who persisted in his mind. Why was it that instead of being in this charming spot to meet her, Destiny had set him down here and filled his mind with one Hoppleton?

Then he became aware that somebody was standing by the stile, under the barberries. Berkeley's heart gave a curious little dart as he saw her, as if it had said to him: What if that were she? Cardle's having read his most secret Peyson's Paint thoughts made him nervously ready for any coincidence. He even quickened his steps, hardly daring his second glance toward the lady for fear of her failure to be, impossibly, the right one. And when he did look again he could have found it in his heart to stop in the path, for the actuality seemed the most impossible of all.

She was not in blue linen. She was in white serge. Her hair did not go rippling back from her face, but it lay in little bright tendrils all about her forehead. And her eyes, instead of smiling, were grave and direct. In a word, she was not in the very least like the lady of Berkeley's two days of dreams; and yet, with her almost disconcerting prettiness, she was here in the meadow quite as if he himself had just wished her in place with his imagining. Here was the meadow, still golden in the light of the cloud-piled sky; here was he himself, even as before; and here stood this unexpected little figure at the stile—exactly as if Destiny had repented!

Berkeley was not the man to repudiate Destiny. It flashed through his mind that the only way in which he could, conceivably, speak with her was to ask her the way to the Briller lodge—though the lodge lay in plain sight not a stone's throw beyond the barberries. But when he would have done so he found to his delight that the lady was about to speak to him; which she did, with eyes still grave and direct.

“I beg your pardon,” she said, “may I trouble you to tell me the nearest way to the Briller's boat-house?”

In the instant that it took Berkeley to direct her he understood, of course, that she must belong to the party on the Mer-boat. And when he had shown her where lay the nearest way through the fields, and she had thanked him and moved a step away, he found words to detain her, with a kind of boyish eagerness.

“Do you mind my asking,” he said, “if you are not with Mr. Cardle's party on the Mer-boat?” and took just time enough to note how beautiful her eyebrows were when they went imperceptibly up, before he added: “Because I am with them—I've come an errand to the lodge there—and I could show you the way back, if I may.”

“Thank you,” said the lady; “if you are going to the yacht—and if you will be so good.”

If he would be so good! Berkeley hurried up the length of road to the Briller lodge blessing the very name of the unknown, absent Hoppleton who had unconsciously brought about this meeting—Hoppleton, who, they told him on the wire, had not yet reached Briller Place. Berkeley strove to leave coherent directions, and he was back to the meadow in the time that it had taken the lady to gather half a dozen great, knowing-looking daisies for her belt. And then the two walked together through the lush, gray-green grass, in the fairy light of the yellow sky.

Berkeley was not imaginative. But as he looked across the meadows in the high moment of that sunset he half wondered if he had not, as he walked that path before, trodden on a bit of magic ground while he made his wish—so that the wish had come partly true. And Berkeley was not inconstant—for surely it was not inconstancy to forget a Blue Linen Lady whom he had never seen.

She said: “These fields are very confusing. I was certain that I had the right one, quarter of a mile away.”

And he answered, with a half-belief in his own words: “These are very remarkable fields. I believe that if people walk here and make a wish, the wish comes true.”

“How interesting!” she said, with a smile in her eyes; “I wonder whether any one has ever tried it.”

“I dare say that everybody who goes through here makes a wish, whether he knows about the meadow or not,” Berkeley suggested. “But I should like to hear some one wish, so as to be sure.”

“I wish,” she said promptly, “for that extremely pretty bit of goldenrod by this rock here.”

Berkeley broke the stalk and, as he gave it to her:

“Do you not see?” he said gravely. “I more than half believed it all the time!”

Then they laughed a little, perhaps for the very sake of the yellow light in the meadow, and after that Berkeley never could remember exactly of what they did talk. Not that it mattered in the very least; for he remembered perfectly the way the sun caught the bright tendrils of hair about her forehead and the way in which, twice in their progress, her eyes, grave and direct, met his as they talked. It was all swift and bewildering, but all the time Berkeley knew that he was never to for get the walk or the meadow—or this lady. And she would be on the Mer-boat too!

When they emerged on the smooth white sand of the beach, with the very waves of the Sound running in toward them with little curtsies, every one had been rowed out to the yacht, and the dory was returning for him. On the deck of the Mer-boat stood Cardle, big in his yachting flannels; and he turned and looked curiously at Berkeley and the lady, taking their serene way toward the water's edge. Her hair was uncovered to the low-slanting brightness, and she stood slim and erect between Berkeley and the blinding water as they waited for the little boat. Berkeley was smiling—perhaps for the sake of the yellow light that smote the sand; perhaps because it had just come to him that if this were to be his love-story, it had had a perfect beginning. The “star and a blazing moon and a cue for a nightingale” could not more delicately have heralded the hour. And Cardle, watching from the deck of his yacht—Cardle, the resourceful, the hearty—remembered inspirationally that these two must be strangers to each other. Therefore, there being a megaphone at his elbow, he lifted it.

“Berke-ley!” he roared in his might, “E-dith! Both of you listen. Miss Fairmont, this is Berkeley. Berke-ley, my niece. Hustle up. We are sta-arving.”

Berkeley never forgot Edith Fairmont's smile.

“I wonder,” she said, as he handed her to the stern, “whether anybody ever did that before. I hope not.”

“In some respects,” said Berkeley, and his eyes met hers across the bent back of the man who was pushing out, “in some respects the moment was a revelation.”

Then they dipped away over the near rosy water to where the Mer-boat fluttered, like a great silver bow pinned to the far blue. Star or blazing moon or nightingale or megaphone, it was all one to Berkeley now.

On deck they found Mrs. Briller, still in agitation over one Hoppleton, forgotten; and Mrs. Cardle, a shawl slipping from her shoulders and a magazine in her hand—fussy and sweet and given to commonplace; and Cardle, big and genuine and sta-arving; and the two who were engaged and who were so self-absorbed that they might be counted out. All of whom mattered not at all to Berkeley, who was utterly resigned to awaiting the absent Hoppleton or every one else, so long as things were as things were.

“I wish Hoppy would hurry,” said Cardle presently. “I wanted to make Reed's Hollow before the mail-boat goes.”

Berkeley heard that. Reed's Hollow, where he had lately thought of going down in natty, up-to-date armor.

“Reed's Hollow?” he repeated vaguely,

“Yes,” said Cardle, “that's where I live, That's where my summer-place is, you know.”

Berkeley listened, though his interest—now—was merely the interest which a conscientious observer takes in a coincidence. And not at all the sort of interest which he felt, say, in watching Miss Fairmont's bright hair stir in the freshening wind, or the envy with which he saw her maid come folding a wrap about her. A maid whose trim back annoyed Berkeley subconsciously, because it interposed for the briefest time between him and Edith Fairmont's deck-chair. A maid who, as she was leaving, paused for a moment, arrested by some trivial word of direction. And Berkeley glanced up.

The maid was standing by the deck-rail, and she wore blue linen. Her hair was rippling back from her face and, though she had a very pretty air of deference, her eyes were smiling. And her arms were so folded that a hand touched either elbow where the blue sleeve stopped. And, in spite of her little cap and apron, she was so finely picturesque that a hundred belted earls might have been in their graves to account for her. So as soon as Berkeley saw her he knew just all doubting that it was she—that this was the Blue Linen Lady of his two days of dreams!

He watched her, smiling a little—with the conscientious interest of an impartial observer of a coincidence.

“Hasn't that maid posed for some magazine advertisement lately?” he asked idly of Cardle—but even then he hardly smiled at the way that his dream had ended, because he was so content.

“Yes,” said Cardle delightedly, “I thought people'd notice that advertisement. Yes, she posed for Peyson's Paints. You and I were talkin' about 'em, Berkeley. I always talk with everybody about 'em. You know my niece Edith there—she's Peyson. She owns the paint-works,” he said confidentially, “root and branch—old Peyson was her great-uncle. That's what I meant about my being interested. Come down some time and I'll show you around.”

Berkeley listened, with mirth in his eyes for the sake of this coincidence that meant something—as coincidences seldom do. He looked away to the beach and saw the figure of one who he supposed would be Hoppleton hurrying down to the dingey. Hoppleton. And he, Berkeley, had actually thought that Destiny intended him to be solely concerned with the affairs of one Hoppleton, whom he had never seen! Oh, there lay the meadow of lush green grass, starred with meadowsweet, and here was he himself; and there in the steamer-chair was proof that the delightful things are the most possible of all. And Berkeley's smile was by no means for the sake of the fading light in the cloud-piled sky.

“How perfect the meadows look!” said Edith Fairmont when the Blue Linen Lady had gone below.

“They are wishing meadows,” offered Berkeley. “I know of a wish that was made there, and the wish came true.”

“And was it about goldenrod?” she asked gravely.

“Ah, well, partly perhaps,” Berkeley said, telling the truth.

Then Mrs. Cardle bent forward, her shawl slipping from her shoulders, a magazine in her hand.

“You were speaking of a magazine advertisement,” she said plaintively. “Well, don't you think that the magazine advertisements in these days are simply wonderful?”

Upon which Mrs. Briller passed the subject around as if it had been bonbons.

“So original—such pains taken to make them artistic—such pretty girls to pose for the pictures,” she said. “I always look the advertisements through just as much as I do the magazine matter,” she contributed, with a kind of pride.

But Berkeley did not even think of a groan. How should he—in a world where the delightful things are so uncompromisingly possible?