The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig Part 33

"Grant!" she cried. As he turned she rose, advanced with a friendly smile and put out her hand for his. "Thank you," she said. "You have shown yourself OUR best friend."

"I meant to be," he answered earnestly, as he pressed her hand. "When I pull myself together I think you'll realize I'm some decenter than I've seemed of late."

Madam Bowker came just as he returned with Craig. So all attention was concentrated upon the meeting of the two impossibilities. The old lady took her new relative's hand with a gracious, queenly smile--a smile that had the effect both of making him grateful and of keeping him "in his place." Said she, "I have been writing out the announcement."

"Thank you," was Joshua's eager, respectful reply.

She gave him the sheet of notepaper she was carrying in her left hand.

It was her own private paper, heavy, quiet, rich, engraved with aristocratic simplicity, most elegant; and most elegant was the handwriting. "This," said she, "is to be given out in addition to the formal notice which Grant will send to the newspapers."

Craig read:

"Mrs. Bowker announces the marriage of her granddaughter, Margaret Severence, and Joshua Craig, of Wayne, Minnesota, and Washington, by the Reverend Doctor Scones, at the Waldorf, this morning. Only a few relatives and Mr. Craig's friend, Mr. Grant Arkwright, were present. The marriage occurred sooner than was expected, out of consideration for Mrs. Bowker, as she is very old, and wished it to take place before she left for her summer abroad."

Craig lifted to the old lady the admiring glance of a satisfied expert in public opinion. Their eyes met on an equality; for an instant he forgot that she figured in his imagination as anything more than a human being. "Splendid!" cried he, with hearty enthusiasm. "You have covered the case exactly. Grant, telephone for an a.s.sociated Press reporter and give him this."

"I'll copy it off for him," said Grant.

Madam Bowker and Craig exchanged amused glances. "You'll give it to him in Madam Bowker's handwriting," ordered Craig. "You told Scones to keep his mouth shut, when you paid him?"

The other three looked conscious, and Margaret reddened slightly at this coa.r.s.e brusqueness of phrase. "Yes," said Grant. "He'll refuse to be interviewed. I'll go and attend to this."

"We're having a gala lunch, at once--in the apartment," said the old lady. "So, come back quickly."

When he was gone she said to the two: "And now what are your plans?"

"We have none," said Craig.

"I had thought--" began Margaret. She hesitated, colored, went on: "Grandmother, couldn't you get the Millicans' camp in the Adirondacks? I heard Mrs. Millican say yesterday they had got it all ready and had suddenly decided to go abroad instead."

"Certainly," said the old lady. "I'll telephone about it at once, and I'll ask the Millicans to lunch with us to-day."

She left them alone. Craig, eyeing his bride covertly, had a sense of her remoteness, her unattainability. He was like a man who, in an hour of rashness and vanity, has boasted that he can attain a certain mountain peak, and finds himself stalled at its very base. He decided that he must a.s.sert himself; he tried to nerve himself to seize her in his old precipitate, boisterous fashion. He found that he had neither the desire to do so nor the ability. He had never thought her so full of the lady's charm. That was just the trouble--the lady's charm, not the human being's; not the charm feminine for the male.

"I hope you'll be very patient with me," said she, with a wan smile. "I am far from well. I've been debating for several days whether or not to give up and send for the doctor."

He did not see her real motive in thus paving the way for the formation of the habit of separate lives; he eagerly believed her, was grateful to her, was glad she was ill. So quaint is the interweaving of thought, there flashed into his mind at that moment: "After all, I needn't have blown in so much money on trousseau. Maybe I can get 'em to take back those two suits of twenty-dollar pajamas. Grant went in too deep." This, because the money question was bothering him greatly, the situation that would arise when his savings should be gone; for now it seemed to him he would never have the courage to discuss money with her. If she could have looked in upon his thoughts she would have been well content; there was every indication of easy sailing for her scheme to reconstruct his career.

"When do you think of starting for the Adirondacks?" he asked, with a timidity of preliminary swallowing and blushing that made her turn away her face to hide her smile. How completely hers was the situation! She felt the first triumphant thrill of her new estate.

"To-night," she replied. "We can't put it off."

"No, we can't put it off," a.s.sented he, hesitation in his voice, gloom upon his brow. "Though," he added, "you don't look at all well." With an effort: "Margaret, are you glad--or sorry?"

"Glad," she answered in a firm, resolute tone. It became a little hard in its practicality as she added: "You were quite right. We took the only course."

"You asked me to be a little patient with you," he went on.

She trembled; her glance fluttered down.

"Well--I--I--you'll have to be a little patient with me, too." He was red with embarra.s.sment. She looked so still and cold and repelling that he could hardly muster voice to go on: "You can't but know, in a general sort of way, that I'm uncouth, unaccustomed to the sort of thing you've had all your life. I'm going to do my best, Margaret. And if you'll help me, and be a little forbearing, I think--I hope--you'll soon find I'm--I'm--oh, you understand."

She had given a stealthy sigh of relief when she discovered that he was not making the protest she had feared. "Yes, I understand," replied she, her manner a gentle graciousness, which in some moods would have sent his pride flaring against the very heavens in angry scorn. But he thought her most sweet and considerate, and she softened toward him with pity. It was very, pleasant thus to be looked up to, and, being human, she felt anything but a lessened esteem for her qualities of delicateness and refinement, of patrician breeding, when she saw him thus on his knees before them. He had invited her to look down on him, and she was accepting an invitation which it is not in human nature to decline.

There was one subject she had always avoided with him--the subject of his family. He had not exactly avoided it, indeed, had spoken occasionally of his brothers and sisters, their wives and husbands, their children. But his reference to these humble persons, so far removed from the station to which he had ascended, had impressed her as being dragged in by the ears, as if he were forcing himself to pretend to himself and to her that he was not ashamed of them, when in reality he could not but be ashamed. She felt that now was the time to bring up this subject and dispose of it.

Said she graciously: "I'm sorry your father and mother aren't living.

I'd like to have known them."

He grew red. He was seeing a tiny, unkempt cottage in the outskirts of Wayne, poor, even for that modest little town. He was seeing a bent, gaunt old laborer in jeans, smoking a pipe on the doorsill; he was seeing, in the kitchen-dining-room-sitting-room-parlor, disclosed by the open door, a stout, aggressive-looking laborer's wife in faded calico, doing the few thick china dishes in dented dishpan on rickety old table.

"Yes," said he, with not a trace of sincerity in his ashamed, constrained voice, "I wish so, too."

She understood; she felt sorry for him, proud of herself. Was it not fine and n.o.ble of her thus to condescend? "But there are your brothers and sisters," she went graciously on. "I must meet them some time."

"Yes, some time," said he, laboriously pumping a thin, watery pretense of enthusiasm into his voice.

She had done her duty by his dreadful, impossible family. She pa.s.sed glibly to other subjects. He was glad she had had the ladylike tact not to look at him during the episode; he wouldn't have liked any human being to see the look he knew his face was wearing.

In the press of agitating events, both forgot the incident--for the time.

CHAPTER XXI

A SWOOP AND A SCRATCH

When Molly Stillwater heard that Margaret and her "wild man" had gone into the woods for their honeymoon she said: "Rita's got to tame him and train him for human society. So she's taken him where there are no neighbors to hear him scream as--as--" Molly cast about in her stock of slang for a phrase that was vigorous enough--"as she 'puts the boots'

to him."

It was a shrewd guess; Margaret had decided that she could do more toward "civilizing" him in those few first weeks and in solitude than in years of teaching at odd times. In China, at the marriage feast, the bride and the groom each struggle to be first to sit on the robe of the other; the idea is that the winner will thenceforth rule. As the Chinese have been many ages at the business of living, the custom should not be dismissed too summarily as mere vain and heathenish superst.i.tion. At any rate, Margaret had reasoned it out that she must get the advantage in the impending initial grapple and tussle of their individualities, or choose between slavery and divorce. With him handicapped by awe of her, by almost groveling respect for her ideas and feelings in all man and woman matters, domestic and social, it seemed to her that she could be worsted only by a miracle of stupidity on her part.

Never had he been so nearly "like an ordinary man--like a gentleman"--as when they set out for the Adirondacks. She could scarcely believe her own eyes, and she warmed to him and felt that she had been greatly overestimating her task. He had on one of the suits he had bought ready made that morning. It was of rough blue cloth--dark blue--most becoming and well draped to show to advantage his lithe, powerful frame, its sinews so much more manly-looking than the muscularity of artificially got protuberances usually seen in the prosperous cla.s.ses in our Eastern cities. Grant had selected the suit, had selected all the suits, and had superintended the fittings. Grant had also selected the negligee shirt and the fashionable collar, and the bright, yet not gaudy, tie, and Grant had selected the shoes that made his feet look like feet; and Grant had conducted him to a proper barber, who had reduced the mop of hair to proportion and order, and had restored its natural color and look of vitality by a thorough shampooing. In brief, Grant had taken a gloomy pleasure in putting his successful rival through the machine of civilization and bringing him out a city man, agreeable to sight, smell and touch.

"Now," said he, when the process was finished, "for Heaven's sake try to keep yourself up to the mark. Take a cold bath every morning and a warm bath before dinner."

"I have been taking a cold bath every day since I got my private bathroom," said Joshua, with honest pride.

"Then you're just as dirty as the average Englishman. He takes a cold bath and fancies he's clean, when in fact he's only clean-looking. Cold water merely stimulates. It takes warm water and soap to keep a man clean."

"I'll bear that in mind," said Craig, with a docility that flattered Grant as kindly attentions from a fierce-looking dog flatter the timid stranger.

"And you must take care of your clothes, too," proceeded the arbiter elegantiarum. "Fold your trousers when you take them off, and have them pressed. Get your hair cut once a week--have a regular day for it. Trim your nails twice a week. I've got you a safety razor. Shave at least once a day--first thing after you get out of bed is the best time. And change your linen every day. Don't think because a shirt isn't downright dirty that you can pa.s.s it off for fresh."

"Just write those things down," said Josh. "And any others of the same kind you happen to think of. I hate to think what a state I'd be in if I hadn't you. Don't imagine I'm not appreciating the self-sacrifice."

Grant looked sheepish. But he felt that his shame was unwarranted, that he really deserved Craig's tactless praise. So he observed virtuously: "That's where we men are beyond the women. Now, if it were one woman fixing up another, the chances are a thousand to one she'd play the cat, and get clothes and give suggestions that'd mean ruin."