The Second Generation Part 38

It is not in human nature to refuse to press an offered advantage. Said Del: "Can't we close up most of the house--use only five or six rooms on the ground floor? And Mrs. Dorsey's gardener and his helpers will be there. All we have to do is to see that they've not neglected the grounds." She was once more all belief and enthusiasm. "It seemed to me, taking that place was most economical, and so comfortable. Really, Dory, I didn't accept without thinking."

Dory was debating with himself: To take that house--it was one of those trifles that are anything but trifles--like the slight but crucial motion at the crossroads in choosing the road to the left instead of the road to the right. Not to take the house--Del would feel humiliated, reasoned he, would think him unreasonably small, would chafe under the restraint their limited means put upon them, whereas, if he left the question of living on their income entirely to her good sense, she would not care about the deprivations, would regard them as self-imposed.

"Of course, if you don't like it, Dory," she now said, "I suppose Mrs.

Dorsey will let me off. But I'm sure you'd be delighted, once we got settled. The house is so attractive--at least, I think I can make it attractive by packing away her showy stuff and rearranging the furniture.

And the grounds--Dory, I don't see how you can object!"

Dory gave a shrug and a smile. "Well, go ahead. We'll scramble through somehow." He shook his head at her in good-humored warning. "Only, please don't forget what's coming at the end of your brief year of grandeur."

Adelaide checked the reply that was all but out. She hastily reflected that it might not be wise to let him know, just then, that Mrs. Dorsey had said they could have the house for two years, probably for three, perhaps for five. Instead, she said, "It isn't the expense, after all, that disturbs you, is it?"

He smiled confession. "No."

"I know it's sn.o.bbish of me to long for finery so much that I'm even willing to live in another person's and show off in it," she sighed.

"But--I'm learning gradually."

He colored. Unconsciously she had put into her tone--and this not for the first time, by any means--a suggestion that there wasn't the slightest danger of his wearying of waiting, that she could safely take her time in getting round to sensible ideas and to falling in love with him. His eyes had the look of the veiled amus.e.m.e.nt that deliberately shows through, as he said, "That's good. I'll try to be patient."

It was her turn to color. But, elbowing instinctive resentment, came uneasiness. His love seemed to her of the sort that flowers in the romances--the love that endures all, asks nothing, lives forever upon its own unfed fire. As is so often the case with women whose charms move men to extravagance of speech and emotion, it was a great satisfaction to her, to her vanity, to feel that she had inspired this wonderful immortal flame; obviously, to feed such a flame by giving love for love would reduce it to the commonplace. All women start with these exaggerated notions of the value of being loved; few of them ever realize and rouse themselves, or are aroused, from their vanity to the truth that the value is all the other way. Adelaide was only the natural woman in blindly fancying that Dory was the one to be commiserated, in not seeing that she herself was a greater loser than he, that to return his love would not be a concession but an acquisition. Most men are content to love, to compel women to receive their love; they prefer the pa.s.sive, the receptive att.i.tude in the woman, and are even bored by being actively loved in return; for love is exacting, and the male is impatient of exaction.

Adelaide did not understand just this broad but subtle difference between Dory and "most men"--that he would feel that he was violating her were he to sweep her away in the arms of his impetuous released pa.s.sion, as he knew he could. He felt that such a yielding was, after all, like the inert obedience of the leaf to the storm wind--that what he could compel, what women call love, would be as utterly without substance as an image in a mirror, indeed, would be a mere pa.s.sive reflection of his own love--all most men want, but worthless to him.

Could it be that Dory's love had become--no, not less, but less ardent?

She saw that he was deep in thought--about her, she a.s.sumed, with an unconscious vanity which would have excited the mockery of many who have more vanity than had she, and perhaps with less excuse. In fact, he was not thinking of her; having the ability to turn his mind completely where he willed--the quality of all strong men, and the one that often makes the weak-willed think them hard--he was revolving the vast and inspiring plans Arthur and he had just got into practical form--plans for new factories and mills such as a university, professing to be in the forefront of progress need not be ashamed to own or to offer to its students as workshops. All that science has bestowed in the way of making labor and its surroundings clean and comfortable, healthful and attractive, was to be provided; all that the ignorance and the shortsighted greediness of employers, bent only on immediate profits and keeping their philanthropy for the smug penuriousness and degrading stupidity of charity, deny to their own self-respect and to justice for their brothers in their power. Arthur and he had wrought it all out, had discovered as a crowning vindication that the result would be profitable in dollars, that their sane and shrewd utopianism would produce larger dividends than the sordid and slovenly methods of their compet.i.tors. "It is always so. Science is always economical as well as enlightened and humane," Dory was thinking when Adelaide's voice broke into his reverie.

"You are right, Dory," said she. "And I shall give up the house. I'll go to see Mrs. Dorsey now."

"The house?--What--Oh, yes--well--no--What made you change?"

She did not know the real reason--that, studying his face, the curve and set of his head, the strength of the personality which she was too apt to take for granted most of the time because he was simple and free from pretense, she had been reminded that he was not a man to be trifled with, that she would better bestir herself and give more thought and attention to what was going on in that superbly shaped head of his--about her, about her and him. "Oh, I don't just know," replied she, quite honestly.

"It seems to me now that there'll be too much fuss and care and--sham.

And I intend to interest myself in _your_ work. You've hardly spoken of it since I got back."

"There's been so little time--"

"You mean," she interrupted, "I've been so busy unpacking my silly dresses and hats and making and receiving silly calls."

"Now you're in one of your penitential moods," laughed Dory. "And to-morrow you'll wish you hadn't changed about the house. No--that's settled. We'll take it, and see what the consequences are."

Adelaide brightened. His tone was his old self, and she did want that house so intensely! "I can be useful to Dory there; I can do so much on the social side of the university life. He doesn't appreciate the value of those things in advancing a career. He thinks a career is made by work only. But I'll show him! I'll make his house the center of the university!"

Mrs. Dorsey had "Villa d'Orsay" carved on the stone pillars of her great wrought-iron gates, to remind the populace that, while her late father-in-law, "Buck" Dorsey, was the plainest of butchers and meat packers, his ancestry was of the proudest. With the rise of its "upper cla.s.s" Saint X had gone in diligently for genealogy, had developed reverence for "tradition" and "blood," had established a Society of Family Histories, a chapter of the Colonial Dames, another of Daughters of the Revolution, and was in a fair way to rival the seaboard cities in devotion to the imported follies and frauds of "family." Dory at first indulged his sense of humor upon their Dorsey or d'Orsay finery. It seemed to him they must choose between making a joke of it and having it make a joke of them. But he desisted when he saw that it grated on Del for him to speak of her and himself as "caretakers for the rich." And presently his disposition to levity died of itself. It sobered and disheartened and, yes, disgusted him as he was forced to admit to himself the reality of her delight in receiving people in the great drawing room, of her content in the vacuous, time-wasting habits, of her sense of superiority through having at her command a troop of servants--Mrs.

Dorsey's servants! He himself disliked servants about, hated to abet a fellow-being in looking on himself or herself as an inferior; and he regarded as one of the basest, as well as subtlest poisons of sn.o.bbishness, the habit of telling others to do for one the menial, personal things which can be done with dignity only by oneself. Once, in Paris--after Besancon--Janet spoke of some of her aristocratic acquaintances on the other side as "acting as if they had always been used to everything; so different from even the best people at home." Dory remembered how Adelaide promptly took her up, gave instance after instance in proof that European aristocrats were in fact as vulgar in their satisfaction in servility as were the newest of the newly aristocratic at home, but simply had a different way of showing it. "A more vulgar way," she said, Janet unable to refute her. "Yes, far more vulgar, Jen, because deliberately concealed; just as vanity that swells in secret is far worse than frank, childish conceit."

And now--These vanities of hers, sprung from the old roots which in Paris she had been eager to kill and he was hoping were about dead, sprung in vigor and spreading in weedy exuberance! He often looked at her in sad wonder when she was unconscious of it. "What _is_ the matter?" he would repeat. "She is farther away than in Paris, where the temptation to this sort of nonsense was at least plausible." And he grew silent with her and shut himself in alone during the evening hours which he could not spend at the university. She knew why, knew also that he was right, ceased to bore herself and irritate him with attempts to make the Villa d'Orsay the social center of the university. But she continued to waste her days in the inane pastimes of Saint X's fashionable world, though ashamed of herself and disgusted with her mode of life. For sn.o.bbishness is essentially a provincial vice, due full as much to narrowness as to ignorance; and, thus, it is most potent in the small "set" in the small town. In the city even the narrowest are compelled to at least an occasional glimpse of wider horizons; but in the small town only the vigilant and resolute ever get so much as a momentary point of view. She told herself, in angry attempt at self-excuse, that he ought to take her in hand, ought to s.n.a.t.c.h her away from that which she had not the courage to give up of herself. Yet she knew she would hate him should he try to do it. She a.s.sumed that was the reason he didn't; and it was part of the reason, but a lesser part than his unacknowledged, furtive fear of what he might discover as to his own feelings toward her, were there just then a casting up and balancing of their confused accounts with each other.

Both were relieved, as at a crisis postponed, when it became necessary for him to go abroad again immediately. "I don't see how _you_ can leave," said he, thus intentionally sparing her a painful effort in saying what at once came into the mind of each.

"We could cable Mrs. Dorsey," she suggested lamely. She was at the Louis Quinze desk in the Louis Quinze sitting room, and her old gold negligee matched in charmingly, and the whole setting brought out the sheen, faintly golden, over her clear skin, the peculiarly fresh and intense shade of her violet eyes, the suggestion of gold in her thick hair, with its wan, autumnal coloring, such as one sees in a field of dead ripe grain. She was doing her monthly accounts, and the showing was not pleasant. She was a good housekeeper, a surprisingly good manager; but she did too much entertaining for their income.

Dory was too much occupied with the picture she made as she sat there to reply immediately. "I doubt," he finally replied, "if she could arrange by cable for some one else whom she would trust with her treasures. No, I guess you'll have to stay."

"I _wish_ I hadn't taken this place!" she exclaimed. It was the first confession of what her real, her sane and intelligent self had been proclaiming loudly since the first flush of interest and pleasure in her "borrowed plumage" had receded. "Why _do_ you let me make a fool of myself?"

"No use going into that," replied he, on guard not to take too seriously this belated penitence. He was used to Del's fits of remorse, so used to them that he thought them less valuable than they really were, or might have been had he understood her better--or, not bothered about trying to understand her. "I shan't be away long, I imagine," he went on, "and I'll have to rush round from England to France, to Germany, to Austria, to Switzerland. All that would be exhausting for you, and only a little of the time pleasant."

His words sounded to her like a tolling over the grave of that former friendship and comradeship of theirs. "I really believe you'll be glad to get away alone," cried she, lips smiling raillery, eyes full of tears.

"Do you think so?" said Dory, as if tossing back her jest. But both knew the truth, and each knew that the other knew it. He was as glad to escape from those surroundings as she to be relieved of a presence which edged on her other-self to scoff and rail and sneer at her. It had become bitterness to him to enter the gates of the Villa d'Orsay. His nerves were so wrought up that to look about the magnificent but too palace-like, too hotel-like rooms was to struggle with a longing to run amuck and pause not until he had reduced the splendor to smithereens. And in that injustice of chronic self-excuse which characterizes all human beings who do not live by intelligently formed and intelligently executed plan, she was now trying to soothe herself with blaming him for her low spirits; in fact, they were wholly the result of her consciously unworthy mode of life, and of an incessant internal warfare, exhausting and depressing. Also, the day would surely come when he would ask how she was contriving to keep up such imposing appearances on their eighteen hundred a year; and then she would have to choose between directly deceiving him and telling him that she had broken--no, not broken, that was too harsh--rather, had not yet fulfilled the promise to give up the income her father left her.

After a constrained silence, "I really don't need anyone to stop here with me," she said to him, as if she had been thinking of it and not of the situation between them, "but I'll get Stella Wilmot and her brother."

"Arden?" said Dory, doubtfully. "I know he's all right in some ways, and he has stopped drinking since he got the place at the bank. But--"

"If we show we have confidence in him," replied Adelaide, "I think it will help him."

"Very well," said Dory. "Besides, it isn't easy to find people of the sort you'd be willing to have, who can leave home and come here."

Adelaide colored as she smiled. "Perhaps that _was_ my reason, rather than helping him," she said.

Dory flushed. "Oh, I didn't mean to insinuate that!" he protested, and checked himself from saying more. In their mood each would search the other's every word for a hidden thrust, and would find it.

The constraint between them, which thus definitely entered the stage of deep cleavage where there had never been a joining, persisted until the parting. Since the wedding he had kissed her but once--on her arrival from Europe. Then, there was much bustle of greeting from others, and neither had had chance to be self-conscious. When they were at the station for his departure, it so happened that no one had come with them.

As the porter warned them that the train was about to move, they shook hands and hesitated, blushing and conscious of themselves and of spectators, "Good-by," stammered Dory, with a dash at her cheek.

"Good-by," she murmured, making her effort at the same instant.

The result was a confusion of features and hat brims that threw them into a panic, then into laughter, and so made the second attempt easy and successful. It was a real meeting of the lips. His arm went round her, her hand pressed tenderly on his shoulder, and he felt a trembling in her form, saw a sudden gleam of light leap into and from her eyes.

And all in that flash the secret of his mistake in managing his love affair burst upon him.

"Good-by, Dory--dear," she was murmuring, a note in her voice like the shy answer of a hermit thrush to the call of her mate.

"All aboard!" shouted the conductor, and the wheels began to move.

"Good-by--good-by," he stammered, his blood surging through his head.

It came into her mind to say, "I care for you more than I knew." But his friend the conductor was thrusting him up the steps of the car. "I wish I had said it," thought she, watching the train disappear round the curve.

"I'll write it."

But she did not. When the time came to write, that idea somehow would not fit in with the other things she was setting down. "I think I do care for him--as a friend," she decided. "If he had only compelled me to find out the state of my own mind! What a strange man! I don't see how he can love me, for he knows me as I am. Perhaps he really doesn't; sometimes I think he couldn't care for a woman as a woman wants to be cared for." Then as his face as she had last seen it rose before her, and her lips once more tingled, "Oh, yes, he _does_ care! And without his love how wretched I'd be! What a greedy I am--wanting his love and taking it, and giving nothing in return." That last more than half-sincere, though she, like not a few of her sisters in the "Woman's Paradise," otherwise known as the United States of America, had been spoiled into greatly exaggerating the value of her graciously condescending to let herself be loved.

And she was lonely without him. If he could have come back at the end of a week or a month, he would have been received with an ardor that would have melted every real obstacle between them. Also, it would have dissipated the far more obstructive imaginary obstacles from their infection with the latter-day vice of psychologizing about matters which lie in the realm of physiology, not of psychology. But he did not come; and absence, like bereavement, has its climax, after which the thing that was begins to be as if it had not been.

He was gone; and that impetuous parting caress of his had roused in her an impulse that would never again sleep, would pace its cage restlessly, eager for the chance to burst forth. And he had roused it when he would not be there to make its imperious clamor personal to himself.

As Estelle was at her shop all day, and not a few of the evenings, Del began to see much of Henrietta Hastings. Grandfather Fuller was now dead and forgotten in the mausoleum into which he had put one-fifth of his fortune, to the great discontent of the heirs. Henrietta's income had expanded from four thousand a year to twenty; and she spent her days in thinking of and talking of the careers to which she could help her husband if he would only shake off the lethargy which seized him the year after his marriage to a Fuller heiress. But Hastings would not; he was happy in his books and in his local repute for knowing everything there was to be known. Month by month he grew fatter and lazier and slower of speech. Henrietta pretended to be irritated against him, and the town had the habit of saying that "If Hastings had some of his wife's 'get up' he wouldn't be making her unhappy but would be winning a big name for himself." In fact, had Hastings tried to bestir himself at something definite in the way of action, Henrietta would have been really disturbed instead of simply pretending to be. She had a good mind, a keen wit that had become bitter with unlicensed indulgence; but she was as indolent and purposeless as her husband. All her energy went in talk about doing something, and every day she had a new scheme, with yesterday's forgotten or disdained.

Adelaide pretended to herself to regard Henrietta as an energetic and stimulating person, though she knew that Henrietta's energy, like her own, like that of most women of the sheltered, servant-attended cla.s.s, was a mere blowing off of steam by an active but valveless engine of a mind. But this pretense enabled her to justify herself for long mornings and afternoons at the Country Club with Henrietta. They talked of activity, of accomplishing this and that and the other; they read fitfully at serious books; they planned novels and plays; they separated each day with a comfortable feeling that they had been usefully employed.

And each did learn much from the other; but, as each confirmed the other in the habitual mental vices of the women, and of an increasing number of the men, of our quite comfortable cla.s.ses, the net result of their intercourse was pitifully poor, the poorer for their fond delusions that they were improving themselves. They laughed at the "culture craze"