The Whirligig of Time Part 45

Farewell. Write early and write often, and write Altman catalogues if you must, but not if you are interested in the uplift of drahmah. Give my best to Grandmama, and consider yourself embraced.

IO EL REY.

Madge's reply to this missive was telegraphic in form and brief in substance. It read simply "Sorry. Laura." "I would have signed it Beatrice," she explained in her next letter, "only I was afraid you might think it was from your sister-in-law Beatrice, and there's nothing for _her_ to be sorry about."

Another letter of Harry's, written a few weeks later, shows him in a different mood:

Querida de mis ojos--You don't know Spanish but you ought to gather what that means without great effort--I have weighty news for you. I dashed down to New York on the spur of the moment day before yesterday and showed the first draught of my completed MS to Leo. My dear, he said IT WOULD DO! You don't know what that means, of course; no one could. You all think I have simply to write and say 'Here, play this,' and it is played. You know nothing of how it hurts to put ideas on paper, nothing of the dead weight of responsibility, the loneliness, the self-distrust, the hate of one's own work that the creative brain has to struggle against. Consequently, my dearest, you will just have to take it on trust from me that an interview such as I had yesterday with Bachmann is nothing less than a rebirth. He even advised me not to try to change or improve it much, saying that what changes were needed could best be put in at rehearsals, and I think he's dead right. So I shall do no more than put the third act in shape before I hand the thing over to him and dash home for the holidays. Atmosphere of Yule logs, holly berry and mistletoe!

I really am absurdly happy. You see, it isn't merely success, or a premonition of success (for the first night is still to come); it's in a way a justification of my whole life. If this thing is as good as I think it is, it will amount to a sort of written permit from headquarters to love you, to go on thinking as I do think about certain things and to regard myself--well, it's hard to put into words, but as a dynamic force, rather than as a lucky fool that stumbled across one rather good thing. Not that I shouldn't do all three anyway, to be sure!--And every kind friend will say he knew I would 'make good'; that there never was any doubt my 'coming into my own,'

and all the rest. Oh, Lord, if people only knew! But thank Heaven they don't!

I am becoming obscure and rhapsodic. I seem to 'see' things to-night, like Tilburina in the play. I see strange and distorted conceptions of myself, for one thing; endless and bewildering publicity. Oh, what a comfort it is to think that no matter what I may be to other people, to you I shall always be simply the same stupid, bungling, untidy

HARRY!

I love you with an intensity that beggars the power of human expression.

I did a bracket this afternoon.

Madge never received a letter from him that pleased her more. She was fully alive to its chaotic immaturity, and she smiled at the way he unconsciously appeared to shove his love for her into second place. But there was that about it that convinced her of his greatness as nothing had yet done. It seemed to her that when he spoke of the loneliness of genius and in his prophetic touch at the end about the different ways in which people would regard him he spoke with the true voice of a seer. It all made her feel very humble and solemn. To think that Harry, her Harry, that tall thin thing with the pink cheeks and dark brown hair and the restless black eyes, should be one of the great men of his day, perhaps one of the great ones of all time! Keats--Harry was already older than Keats when he died, but she thought he had much the same temperament; Congreve--she knew how he loved Congreve; Marlowe--she had often compared his golden idealism to that of Marlowe; Shakespeare...?

No, no--of course not! She knew perfectly well he was no Shakespeare....

Still, why not, in time?... And anyway, Marlowe, Congreve, Keats--Wimbourne!

So she dreamed on, till the future, which hitherto she had seen as merely smiling toward her, seemed to rise and with solemn face beckon her to a new height, a place hard to reach and difficult to hold, but one whose very base seemed more exalted than anything she had yet known....

Now Madge was, on the whole, a very fairly modern type of young woman.

Her outlook on the world was based on Darwin, and she held firmly to such eugenic principles as seemed to flow directly from the doctrine of evolution. She had long since declared war to the death on disease, filth and vice, to which she added a lesser foe generally known as "suppression of facts," and she had done a certain amount of real work in helping those less fortunate than herself to the acquisition of health, cleanliness, virtue and "knowledge." She thought that women would get the vote some day, though they weren't ready for it yet, and hadn't joined the Antis because there was no use in being a drag on the wheels of progress, even if you didn't feel like helping. She believed in the "social regeneration" of woman. It was quite clear to her that in the early years of the twentieth century women were beginning--and only just beginning--to take their place beside men in the active work of saving the race; "why, you had only to look at Jane Addams and Florence Nightingale to see--" et cetera.

And yet, and yet....

It was at least as fine a thing to become Mrs. Harold Wimbourne and devote a lifetime to ministering to one of the great creative geniuses of the time as to be a heavy gun on her own account, was what she meant, of course. But that wasn't quite enough. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Harry were not one of the great creative geniuses of the age; suppose there were no question of Congreve, Keats, Wimbourne and so forth; suppose being his wife meant being plain Mrs. Harold Wimbourne and nothing more--what then?

"Well, I suppose I'd still rather be plain Mrs. H. W., if you will have it!" she retorted petulantly to her relentless self. But she soon became glad she had brought herself to the point of admitting it, for, the issue definitely settled, her mind became unaccountably peaceful....

New Year's was scarcely over when rehearsals began, and Harry was in for another period of lounging in shrouded orchestra chairs and watching other people air their ideas, or lack of ideas, on the child of his brain. His lounging was now, however, quite freely punctuated by interruptions and not infrequently by scramblings over the footlights to ill.u.s.trate a fine point. This rather bored the actors; Harry had become almost uncomfortably acute in matter of stage technique. But they had to admit that his suggestions were never foolish or unnecessary.

In due time came the first night. It is no part of our purpose to describe "Pastures New" or its success in this place. If--which is improbable--you have to refresh your mind on it, you have only to ask one of your journalistic friends--don't pretend that you haven't at least one friend on a newspaper--to show you the files of his sheet.

There you will see it all, in what scholars call primary sources:--"New Yorkers Roar With Delight at Feminist Satire," and all the rest of it, like as not on the front page. Harry hated its being called a satire; that was such a cheap and easy way of getting out of it. For when all was over, when people had cried with laughing at its whimsical humor, poked each other with delight at its satirical touches--oh yes, there were plenty of them--quoted its really brilliant dialogue, sat enthralled by its swift and compelling action--for Harry had made good his promise that this play should have "punch"--when they had done all these things to their heart's content, still not a person saw the play who did not come away from it more fully convinced than ever he had been of--well, of what you had only to look at Jane Addams and Florence Nightingale to see. For there were really great moments in the play; moments when no one even thought of laughing, though one was almost always made to laugh the moment after. That was Harry's way, that was his power, to "hit 'em hard and then make 'em laugh just as they begin to feel smarty in the eyes," as Burchard the stage manager not unaptly put it.

"Pastures New" ran for six months in New York alone, and no one laughed harder or less rancorously at it than the "feminists" themselves--or all of them that were worth anything.

Of course both Harry and Madge were tired to death by the time the wedding became imminent, and the final preparations were made in what might be called broad impressionistic strokes.

Madge had at first intended to have a small informal reception in her own house, but Aunt Tizzy had been so disappointed that she had at last consented to let it be at her aunt's and attain the dimensions of a perfect tomasha--the phrase is her own--if it wanted to. Why not? Aunt Tizzy's house could hold it.

"Besides, my dear," argued Harry, "it's only once in a lifetime, after all. If you marry again as a widow you'll only have a silly little wedding, without a veil and no bridesmaids, and if we're divorced you won't have any wedding at all, worth mentioning. Much better do it up brown when you have the chance."

"What about music?" asked Harry as the two stood in final consultation with the organist on the night of the rehearsal. "I've always wondered why people had such perfectly rotten music at weddings, but I begin to see now. Still, if we _could_ have something other than Lohengrin and Mendelssohn I think I could face marriage with a little better heart.

What about it, dear?"

Madge groaned. "Oh, anything! The Star-Spangled Banner, if you want!"

"I think I can arrange it," said the organist smiling, and he played the march from "Tannhauser" and the march from "Athalie," which he always played when people asked for something unusual, and the effect was considered very pleasing and original. Altogether it was the prettiest wedding any one had seen in years, according to the testimony of those who attended the reception--which did become a perfect tomasha. But as tomasha-goers are notoriously biased their testimony probably wasn't legal and no respectable judge would have accepted it as evidence. The only legal thing about the whole affair was the ceremony, which was fully as much so as if it had been before a magistrate, which Madge swore it should be if she ever had to go through it again and regretted bitterly it hadn't been this time.... Well, perhaps, when she looked about her and saw how unaffectedly happy her mother and Aunt Tizzy and the bridesmaids and all the other good people were, she didn't regret it quite so much.

"Though it is rather absurd, getting married to please other people, isn't it?" she remarked as they drove off at last, leaving the tomasha-goers to carouse as long as Aunt Tizzy could make them.

"I think I'd do almost anything to please Aunt Tizzy," said Harry. "Now that it's all over, that is. Get married again, even.... After all," he added suddenly, shamelessly going back on all his professions of the last few days; "after all, you know, it _was_ rather a good wedding!"

Which shows that he was just as biased as any one, at bottom!

CHAPTER IX

LABYRINTHS

How many people should you say could be packed into a three-hundred foot barkantine-rigged steam yacht, capable of fourteen knots under steam alone, for a night in late June, presumably hot, anch.o.r.ed in a noisy estuary off Long Island Sound without making them all wish they had never been born? We ourselves should hate to have to answer the question offhand. So did Aunt Cecilia, whom it concerned more closely than any one else, and she did not have to answer it offhand at all, having all the available statistics within reach. In fact, she had spent the best part of one hot New York June morning over it already, sitting in her darkened front drawing-room because it was the coolest room in the house, amid ghost-like furniture whose drab slip-covers concealed nothing less than real Louis Quinze. On her lap--or what Uncle James said if she didn't look out wouldn't be her lap very long--she held a magazine and over the magazine an expensive piece of letter-paper, on one leaf of which was a list of names and on the other a plan drawn in wobbly and unarchitectural lines--obviously a memory sketch of the sleeping accommodations of the _Halcyone_. Near what even in the sketch was undoubtedly the largest and most comfortable of the _Halcyone's_ cabins she had written in firm unmistakable letters the word "Me," and opposite two other rooms she had inscribed in only slightly less bold characters the initials "H. and M." and "J. and B." So far so good; why not go on thus as long as the list or the cabins held and consider the problem solved? It wasn't as simple as that, it seemed. Some of the people hadn't been asked, or might be asked only if there was room enough, and the boys might bring in people at the last moment; it was very confusing. And not even the extent of the sleeping accommodations was as constant as might have been desired. It was ridiculous, of course, but even after all these years she could not be quite sure whether there were two little single rooms down by the galley skylight or only one. She was practically sure there were two, but suppose she were mistaken? And then, if it came to that, the boys and almost as many friends as they cared to bring might sleep on the smoking-room sofas....

"No ... no, I'm not sure how wise that would be," she mused, certain things she had seen and been told of boat-race celebrations straying into her mind. "The smoking-room cushions have only just been covered...."

A ring at the doorbell. She glanced up at a piergla.s.s (also Louis Quinze) opposite her and strained her eyes at its mosquito-netting covered surface. Her hair was far from what she could have wished; she hoped it would be no one she would have to see. Oh, Beatrice.

"Howdy do, dear," said Aunt Cecilia, relieved. "I was just thinking of you. I'm trying to plan out about the boat-race; it's less than a week off now."

Beatrice sank languidly down on the other end of Aunt Cecilia's sofa.

She was much hotter and more fatigued than Aunt Cecilia, but no one would have guessed it to look at her. Her clothes lay coolly and caressingly on her; not a hair seemed out of place.

"You see," went on the other, "it's rather difficult to arrange, on account of there being so many unmarried people--just the Lyles and the MacGraths and George Grainger for us older ones and the rest all m.u.f.fins' and Jack's friends. I think we shall work out all right, though, with two rooms at the Griswold and the smoking-room to overflow into. I'm tired of bothering about it. Tell me about yourself."

"Nothing much," answered Beatrice. "I much prefer hearing about you. By the way--about the races. I just dropped in to tell you about Tommy Clairloch. He's coming. You did tell me to ask him, didn't you?"

"Yes ... oh, yes, of course. I had forgotten about Lord Clairloch for the moment. I thought he was going west the middle of the month."

"He was, but he didn't. Tommy's rather a fool." Tommy, it may be mentioned, was in the process of improving himself by making a trip around the world, going westward. He had left home in April and so far Upper Montclair was his farthest point west. As Beatrice said, Tommy was rather a fool.

"Oh, not a bit ... only.... By the bye, dear, do you happen to remember whether there are one or two rooms down that little hall by the galley?"

"Two, as I remember it. But don't bother about Tommy. Really, Aunt Cecilia, don't. He needn't come at all--I'll tell him he can't."

"Of course he must come.... That's it--I'll put him in the other little single room and tell the boys that they and any one else they ask from now on must go to the Griswold or sleep in the smoking-room. I'm glad to have it settled."

Aunt Cecilia beamed as one does when a difficult problem is solved. It occurred to her that Beatrice might beam back at her just a tiny bit, if only in mock sympathy. Especially as it was her guest.... But Beatrice remained just as casual as before, sitting easily but immovably in her corner of the sofa with her parasol lying lightly in her slim gloved hands. Aunt Cecilia noticed those hands rather especially; it seemed scarcely human to keep one's gloves on in the house on a day like this!

Characteristically, she gave her thought outlet in words.