A Touch of Sun and Other Stories Part 14

But, after all, did they want a beauty in the family? On theory, no: the few beauties Mrs. Valentin had known in her life had not been the happiest of women. What they did want was an Elsie--their own Elsie--perfectly trained without losing her naturalness, perfectly educated without losing her health, perfectly dressed without thinking of clothes, perfectly accomplished without wasting her time, and, finally, an Elsie perfectly happy. All that parents, situated on the wrong side of the continent for art and culture, and not over-burdened with money, could do to that end, Mrs. Valentin was resolved should be done. Needless to say, very little was to be left to G.o.d.

Mrs. Valentin was born in the East, some forty-odd years before this educational pilgrimage began, of good Unitarian stock,--born with a great sense of personal accountability. She could not have thrown it off and been joyful in the words, "It is He that hath made us, and not we ourselves."

Elsie had got a headache from the early start and the suppressed agitation of parting from her home and her father. Suppression was as natural to her as expression was to her mother. The father and daughter had held each other silently a moment; both had smiled, and both were ill for hours afterward.

But Mrs. Valentin thought that in Elsie's case it was because she had not sent the girl to bed earlier the night before, and insisted on her eating something at breakfast.

Herself--she had lain sleepless for the greater part of that night and many nights previous. She had antic.i.p.ated in its difficulties every stage of the getting off, the subsequent journey, the arrival, their reception by Eastern relatives not seen for years, the introduction of her grown-up daughter, the impression she would make, the beginning of life all over again in a strange city. (She had known her Boston once, but that was twenty years ago.) She foresaw the mistakes she would inevitably make in her choice of means to the desired ends--dressmakers, doctors, specialists of all sorts; the horrible way in which school expenses mount up; the trivial yet poignant comparisons of school life, from which, if Elsie suffered, she would be sure to suffer in silence.

After this fatiguing mental rehearsal she had risen at six, while the electric lights were still burning and the city was cloaked in fog. It was San Francisco of a midsummer morning; fog whistles groaning, sidewalks slippery with wet, and the gray-green trees and tinted flower-beds of the city gardens emerging like the first broad washes of a water-color laid in with a full brush.

She had taken a last survey of her dismantled home, given the last directions to the old Chinese servant left in charge, presided haggardly at the last home breakfast----what a ghastly little ceremony it was! Then Mr.

Valentin had gone across the Oakland ferry with them and put them aboard the train, m.u.f.fled up as for winter. They had looked into each other's pale faces and parted for two years, all for Elsie's sake. But what Elsie thought about it--whether she understood or cared for what this sacrifice of home and treasure was to purchase--it was impossible to learn. Still more what her father thought. What he had always said was, "You had better go."

"But do you truly think it _is_ the best thing for the child?"

"I think that, whatever we do, there will be times when we'll wish we had done something different; and there will be other times when we shall be glad we did not. All we can do is the best we know up to date."

"But do you think it is the best?"

"I think, Emmy, that you will never be satisfied until you have tried it, and it's worth the money to me to have you feel that you have done your best."

Mrs. Valentin sighed. "Sometimes I wonder why we do cling to that old fetich of the East. Why can't we accept the fact that we are Western people? The question is, Shall we be the self-satisfied kind or the unsatisfied kind? Shall we be contented and limited, or discontented and grow?"

"I guess we shall be limited enough, either way," Mr. Valentin retorted easily. He had no hankering for the East and no grudge against fate for making him a Western man _malgre lui_. "I've known kickers who didn't appear to grow much, except to grow cranky," he said.

Up to the moment of actual departure, Mrs. Valentin had continued to review her decision and to agonize over its possibilities of disaster; but now that the journey had begun, she was experiencing the rest of change and movement. She was as responsive as a child to fresh outward impressions, and the hyperbolical imagination that caused her such torture when it wrought in the dark hours on the teased fabric of her own life, could give her compensating pleasures by daylight, on the open roads of the world. There was as yet nothing outside the car windows which they had not known of old,--the marsh-meadows of the Lower Sacramento, tide-rivers reflecting the sky, cattle and wild fowl, with an occasional windmill or a duck-hunter's lodge breaking the long sweeps of low-toned color.

The morning sun was drinking up the fog, the temperature in the Pullman steadily rising. Jackets were coming off and shirt-waists blooming out in summer colors, giving the car a homelike appearance.

It was a saying that summer, "By their belts ye shall know them."

Shirt-waists no longer counted, since the ready-made ones for two dollars and a half were almost as chic as the tailor-made for ten. But the belts, the real belts, were inimitable. Sir Lancelot might have used them for his bridle--

"Like to some branch of stars we see Hung in the golden galaxy."

Mrs. Valentin had looked with distinct approval on a mother and daughter who occupied the section opposite. Their impedimenta and belongings were "all right," arguing persons with cultivated tastes, abroad for a summer spent in divers climates, who knew what they should have and where to get it. A similarity of judgment on questions of clothes and shops is no doubt a bond between strange women everywhere; but it was the daughter's belt-buckle before which Mrs. Valentin bowed down and humbled herself in silence. The like of that comes only by inheritance or travel. Antique, pale gold--Cellini might have designed it. There was probably not another buckle like that one in existence. An imitation? No more than its wearer, a girl as white as a white camellia, with gray eyes and thin black eyebrows, and thick black lashes that darkened the eyes all round. There was nothing noticeable in her dress except its freshness and a certain finish in lesser details, understood by the sophisticated. "Swell" was too common a word for her supreme and dainty elegance. Her resemblance to the ordinary full-fleshed type of Pacific coast belle was that of a portrait by Romney--possibly engraved by Cole--to a photograph of some _reina de la fiesta_. This was Mrs. Valentin's exaggerated way of putting it to herself.

Such a pa.s.sionate conservative as she was sure to be prejudiced.

The mother had a more p.r.o.nounced individuality, as mothers are apt to have, and looked quite fit for the ordinary uses of life. She was of the benignant Roman-nosed Eastern type, daughter of generations of philanthropists and workers in the public eye for the public good; a deep, rich voice, an air of command, plain features, abundant gray hair, imported clothes, wonderful, keen, dark eyes overlapped by a fold of the crumpled eyelid,--a personage, a character, a life, full of complex energies and domineering good sense. With gold eye-gla.s.ses astride her high-bridged nose, knees crossed, one large, well-shod foot extended, this mother in Israel sat absorbed like a man in the daily paper, and wroth like a man at its contents. Occasionally she would emit an impatient protest in the deep, maternal tones, and the graceful daughter would turn her head and read over her shoulder in silent a.s.sent.

"How trivial, how self-centred we are!" Mrs. Valentin murmured, leaning across to claim a look from Elsie. "I realize it the moment we get outside our own little treadmill. We do nothing but take thought for what we shall eat and drink and wherewithal we shall be clothed. I haven't thought of the country once this morning. I've been wondering if all the good summer things are gone at Hollander's. It may be very hot in Boston the first few weeks. You will be wilted in your cloth suit."

"Oh, mammy, mammy! what a mammy!" purred Elsie, her pretty upper lip curling in the smile her mother loved--with a reservation. Elsie had her father's sense of humor, and had caught his half-caressing way of indulging it at the "intense" little mother's expense.

"Elsie," she observed, "you know _I_ don't mind your way of speaking to me,--as if I were the girl of sixteen and you the woman of forty,--but I hope you won't use it before the aunts and cousins. I shall be sure to lay myself open, but, dear, be careful. It isn't very good form to be too amused with one's mother. Of course there's as much difference in mothers as in girls," Mrs. Valentin acknowledged. "A certain sort of temperament interferes with the profit one ought to get out of one's experience. If you had my temperament I shouldn't waste this two years' experiment on you; I should know that nothing could change your--spots. But _you_ will learn--everything. How is your head, dear--what?"

Elsie had said nothing; she had not had the opportunity.

At a flag station where the train was halted (this overland train was a "local" as far as Sacramento) Mrs. Valentin looked out and saw a colored man in livery climb down from the back seat of a mail-cart and hasten across the platform with a huge paper box. It proved to be filled with magnificent roses, of which he was the bearer to the ladies opposite. A glance at a card was followed by gracious acknowledgments, and the footman retired beaming. He watched the train off, hat in hand, bowing to the ladies at their window as only a well-raised colored servant can bow.

"The Coudert place lies over there," said Mrs. Valentin, pointing to a ma.s.s of dark trees toward which the trap was speeding. "They have been staying there," she whispered, "doing the west coast, I suppose, with invitations to all the swell houses."

"Is your daughter not well?" the deep voice spoke across the car.

As Elsie could not ride backward, her mother, to give her room, and for the pleasure of watching her, was seated with her own back to the engine, facing most of the ladies in the car.

"She is a little train-sick; she could not eat this morning, and that always gives her a headache."

Elsie raised her eyelashes in faint dissent.

"She should eat something, surely. Have you tried malted milk? I have some of the lozenges; she can take one without raising her head."

Search was made in a distinguished-looking bag, Mrs. Valentin protesting against the trouble, and beseeching Elsie with her eyes to accept one from the little silver box of pastils that was pa.s.sed across the aisle.

Elsie said she really could not--thanks very much.

The keen, dark eyes surveyed her with the look of a general inspecting raw troops, and Mrs. Valentin felt as depressed as the company officer who has been "working up" the troops. "Won't you try one, Elsie?" she pleaded.

"I'd rather not, mother," said Elsie.

She did not repeat her thanks to the great authority, but left her mother to cover her retreat.

"The young girls nowadays do pretty much as they please about eating or not eating," observed the Eastern matron, in her large, impersonal way. "They can match our theories with quite as good ones of their own." She smiled again at Elsie, and the overtures on that side ceased.

"_I_ would have eaten any imaginable thing she offered me," sighed Mrs.

Valentin, "but Elsie is so hard to impress. I cannot understand how a girl, a baby, who has never been anywhere or seen anything, can be so fearfully _posee_. It's the Valentin blood. It's the drop of Indian blood away, 'way back. It's their impa.s.siveness, but it's awfully good form--when she grows up to it."

After this, Mrs. Valentin sat silent for such an unnatural length of time that Elsie roused herself to say something encouraging.

"I shall be all right, mother, after Sacramento. We will take a walk. The fresh air is all I need."

She was as good as her word. The cup of tea and the twenty minutes' stroll made such a happy difference that Mrs. Valentin sent a telegram to her husband to say that Elsie's head was better and that she had forgotten her trunk keys, and would he express them to her at once.

So much refreshed was Elsie that her mother handed her the letters which had come to her share of that morning's mail. There were four or five of them, addressed in large, girlish hands, and exhibiting the latest and most expensive fads in stationery. Over one of them Elsie gave a shriek of delight, an outburst so unexpected and out of character with her former self that their distinguished fellow travelers involuntarily looked up,--and Mrs. Valentin blushed for her child.

"Oh, mammy, how rich! How just like Gladys! She kept it for a last surprise! Mother, Gladys is going to Mrs. Barrington's herself."

The mother's face fell.

"Indeed!" she said, forcing a tone of pleasure. "Well, it's a compliment--on both sides. Mrs. Barrington is very particular whom she takes, and the Castants are sparing nothing that money can do for Gladys."

"Oh, what fun!" cried Elsie, her face transformed. "Poor Gladys! she'll have a perfectly awful time too, and we can sympathize."

"Are you expecting to have an 'awful time,' Elsie,"--the mother looked aghast,--"and are you going to throw yourself into the arms of Gladys for sympathy? Then let me say, my daughter, that neither Mrs. Barrington nor any one else can do much for your improvement, and all the money we are spending will be thrown away. If you are going East to ally yourself exclusively with Californian girls, to talk California and think California and set yourself against everything that is not Californian, we might just as well take the first train west at Colfax."

"But am I to be different to Gladys when we meet away from home?" Elsie's sensitive eyes clouded. Her brows went up.

"Of course not. Gladys is a dear, delightful girl. I'm as fond of her as you are. But you can have Gladys all the rest of your life, I hope. I'm not a sn.o.b, dear, but I do think we should recognize the fact that some acquaintances are more improving than others."

"And cultivate them for the sake of what they can do for us?"