Bobbie, General Manager/Chapter 16
CHAPTER XVI
EVER since I can remember having any ideas on the subject at all, I have always longed to be married in one of those dark, little tucked-away chapels in some cathedral or other, in France or England, like a girl I read about in a book. Perhaps a late afternoon service would be going on up near the big altar; candles would be burning; the priest would be chanting queer minor things; poor women would be stepping in, crossing themselves, to say a prayer; and, all unconscious of me, nearly hidden by the big stone pillars, tourists would be tip-toeing about, gazing at the rose-window and the towering arches. There would be footfalls and whispers in the nave. Echoes everywhere. I should have loved the echoes! "But then," Edith said, "you wouldn't have had a sign of a wedding present, and you can't furnish your house with echoes, crazy Bobbs."
If ever there was a wedding opposite to my ideal of one, it was mine. For of course I am married to Dr. Maynard.
You aren't surprised, I know. It was all decided that afternoon at three, and two weeks later when Will sailed back to Germany it wasn't in imagination that I stood on the dock and waved him good-bye. I was there soul and body this time, and I followed with my fluttering handkerchief every motion that he made with his hat and great spoke of an arm. I watched him till he faded out of sight, and then with Ruth and Edith, who went to New York with me, I returned to the shops to buy my trousseau.
Will had to be back in Germany on May first to deliver a lecture before a very learned assembly of scientists and doctors. They wanted him to tell them about a few of his experiments with his guinea-pigs. It was a great compliment for so young a man, and an American besides, to receive an invitation to address a body of old-world sages. Of course he couldn't disappoint them, but he told me that by the middle of August he would be sailing back again and after a simple little wedding in the dead quiet of midsummer, he would at last carry his refugee back with him to Europe. He was not going to begin work until October. We planned to travel till then.
"So, after all," said Will to me that afternoon at three o'clock, "after all, some day—oh, Lucy—perhaps some day—" and this time it was I who finished the sentence.
"Yes, perhaps some day," I said sparkling, "the refugee and you will be seeing Paris together."
Our plans would have been lovely if they had worked out; but they didn't. I haven't seen Paris yet, and there's no prospect that I shall until Will's Sabbatical year comes around. We're going across then, he says, if we have to work our way on a cattle ship. You see Will no sooner got back there to Germany and delivered his lectures to those old sages, than the medical department of one of the biggest universities here in America sent him an invitation to become a member of their faculty. The position was quite to his taste, he wrote me. He could keep right on with his experimenting and guinea-pigs to his heart's content—the university had wonderfully equipped laboratories, the best in America—and what did I say? What should I say to a person whose very picture that had been taken for just me to put on my bureau, had appeared in two magazines that month? Such an insignificant tail to the big lion as I, ought cheerfully to go wagging to the North Pole or the Sahara Desert. Of course I didn't say a word.
I never saw anything like the way the magazines burst forth in sudden praise of Will. His appointment to the faculty of the university was reported in every paper published. I didn't know whether my emotions were of pride or fear. After reading an account of what Dr. William Ford Maynard had accomplished and how high his position was in the scientific world, and then, immediately following, seeing the announcement of his engagement to Miss Lucy Chenery Vars, of Hilton, Mass., I was filled with a good deal of apprehension.
Edith was delighted with my engagement. To boast of William Ford Maynard as a future brother-in-law was a great feather in her cap. The plans for an elaborate wedding were formed and crystallised before I had gotten used to wearing my engagement ring. I didn't want a big wedding, but it seemed useless to remonstrate. You see I was under obligations to Edith. All my linen, stiff gorgeous stuff with heavy elaborate monograms, she had given me; bath towels two yards long which I despise, sets of underwear all ruffles, fol-de-rols and satin rosettes, she had bestowed upon me; also my solid silver service, Sheffield tray and flat silver were gifts from Edith. I didn't like my flat silver. The design is awfully elaborate, representing a horn of plenty overflowing with pears and grapes and apples. Edith, however, thought it was stunning. I didn't like my wedding invitations, thick as leather, engraved in enormous block letters, my name staring at me like a sign over a store and a whole pack of cards besides. But Edith did. I didn't want the ceremony to take place in the Episcopal church which Edith has been attending lately, with a boys' choir preceding me up the aisle, when I've always been a plain straight old-fashioned Congregationalist. I didn't want eight bridesmaids of Edith's choosing, selected from the most prominent families that she could find. I didn't want all society invited. But I soon discovered that my wedding was to be Edith's party, not mine.
On the morning of the fifth day before the great occasion I was in the Circassian walnut guest-chamber looking at the overwhelming display of wedding presents. The original furniture had been moved into the stable and a low wide shelf covered with heavy white damask ran around the entire room. Edith had put all the cut-glass together in the bay-window, and under the glare of a dozen extra electric lights it sparkled bright and hard. There were two enormous punch-bowls, a lamp, a vase big enough for an umbrella-stand, thirteen berry dishes, baskets and candlesticks, two ice-cream sets, two dozen finger-bowls and six dozen glasses. I hate cut-glass!
"Lucy, Lucy, you up there?" somebody called as I gazed.
"I suppose so," I sang back, and I heard Edith coming up the stairs. I hadn't a doubt but that she would be staggering under a fresh load of presents and I wasn't mistaken. She appeared with a regular Pisa Tower of them, extending up to her eyes.
"How's this for a haul?" she gasped. "Come on, my dear, hustle up and see what you draw." Then she added, "Gracious, Lucy, where in the world did you resurrect that old dress? Don't you know every one will be dropping in at all hours during these last days?" Edith herself was fairly dazzling in stiff crackling white linen.
"It was so comfortable," I murmured, "and it has no bones in the collar."
"I should say it hadn't! Your bridesmaids will be here any minute. Hurry up and look at these things, and then go and get yourself fixed up. Do."
I began silently on the bottom box, cut the string, removed the cover, and from beneath the tissue-paper drew out a red flannelette bag.
"It's another plateau," I said wearily before I unpulled the draw-string. I had seven already.
"A plateau! From the Elmer Scotts!" She tossed the cards over to me contemptuously. "That girl visited me for two weeks before I was married. They have loads. A plateau! Only the six-fifty size at that, and—how disgusting—marked!"
I didn't know the Scotts from Adam. Half my presents were from Edith's friends. I didn't see why the Scotts should give me anything.
"Why, they were invited to the reception, my dear!" said Edith, scandalised. "Come, pass it over! Here goes for three hundred and seventy-two," and she tore off a little number from a sheet of others, touched it with the tip of her tongue and slapped it on to the face of the plateau. She listed it under S in a small book and placed it with my seven other plateaus on the silver table. I hadn't liked putting them all together. "But, nonsense," Edith had said. "Don't you see, little simpleton, if they are together, people can tell how many plateaus you have at a glance? My goodness, three hundred and seventy-two presents so far and three more days yet! I'll bet you get five hundred. Dear me, Lucy," she broke off, "there come your bridesmaids. Do go and change your dress. Put on the embroidered mulle; and hurry, child."
I suppose my blue checked gingham did look faded and plain, but I went to my room with a great swelling loyalty in my heart for every plain thing in the world. I hung my blue gingham in the closet almost tenderly. Already my wedding costume was there, staring at me from the corner—shining satin and expensive lace, little sachet bags sewed into the lining, and, on the belt inside, the name in gold letters of one of the most fashionable dressmakers in New York. I was gazing at it, wishing with all my heart that I hadn't got to take the place of the tissue-paper now stuffed into the waist and sleeves, when my sister-in-law suddenly appeared at the door.
"Hurry, Bobbie," she said. "Hurry, do. Your bridesmaids are all here and the Leonard Jacksons have brought over the John Percivals in their car. Don't forget the Jacksons gave you the dozen silver coquilholders, and the Percivals the Dresden service plates. Be nice to Mrs. Percival. She's going to be one of your neighbours next year. I must run along. They'll be wondering." She started to go, but turned back and added, "Why in the world aren't you more enthusiastic, Lucy? You ought to be the happiest girl in the world, I think. I never saw a more elaborate trousseau or a costlier layout of presents in my life. I can't imagine what else you want!"
A maid knocked outside the door and spoke to Edith. I didn't hear the message, but Edith gave a little exclamation and hurried away.
"The King Georges or the Kaiser Wilhelms in their aeroplane, no doubt," I muttered, and made a face at my wedding-gown as I yanked down my embroidered mulle.
I am going to skip the details of my wedding—the broiling condition of the thermometer, the sweltering bridesmaids, the crowds, the push, the funny grown-up feeling in my heart when Alec and Tom kissed me good-bye so gently, the joy when the train finally gave a snort and a jerk, and I knew that Edith in her pearls and satin couldn't possibly follow. I am so anxious to describe the funny old brown house that Will and I leased in the shadow of chemistry buildings, law-schools, and dormitories down here in this university town, and the life—the curious, happy, contented life that I drifted into—that I do not want to waste any time.
The week after my wedding Edith sailed with Ruth for four months in Europe. That is how it happened that she wasn't on the ground to superintend the choice of a residence for Will and me. I knew very well that Edith would never have countenanced for a minute the house that we finally decided to rent for the winter. It was a brown, square affair, a door in the middle with a window on each side, not colonial in the least, nondescript as it could be, with a slate French roof. Will and I thought it would answer the purpose, however—even though the bathtub was tin—and moved into it when the brick sidewalk was sprinkled with yellow maple-leaves, and the gutter was collecting dry ones.
I didn't know a soul in the town. I didn't know the name of a single street except our own. I didn't know where to go to buy even a spool of thread. But I wasn't homesick—oh, no, I wasn't homesick. You see I had forgotten the joy of my own kitchen and pantry; I had forgotten what a collander looked like; I had forgotten how sweet a row of cups are hanging by their handles, underneath a shelf edged with scalloped paper!
I enjoyed acting as my own mistress too; though I am sure if Edith had known what I was up to, she would have left all the pleasures of Paris to set me in the right path. For I didn't even unpack some of my wedding presents. They didn't fit in very well with Will's furniture which he had freighted down from the old white-pillared house in Hilton, and every sliver of which I simply adored. It wasn't colonial furniture, understand, which is so fashionable nowadays, but black walnut of the seventies—high-backed armchairs and sofas and marble-topped bedroom tables. There were funny old steel engravings of the United States Senate, battle scenes, and Abraham Lincoln, besides some big heavy bronzes that Will told me were very valuable. The sideboard was black walnut like everything else and Edith's elaborate silver service made it look so out-of-date that I put on it instead my own mother's old coffee-pot—the one that used to be so heavy for me—and our old-fashioned silver water pitcher with four high goblets to match. I didn't even unlock my enormous chest of silver. Alec had let me take from the safe at home the forks and darling thin spoons and knives that had always been in our family. It was like sheltering old friends under my roof to care for them again.
Edith would have hated the life I drifted into. She would have called it "a mere existence" or "worse than the frontier." From September to February, I didn't go to a single luncheon, tea, or bridge! People had called—members of the faculty, I suppose, I'm sure I don't know, for the cards were mere names to me and I was always out when they were left. You see one evening I had run across something in a pamphlet of Will's on our living-room table that set me to thinking. The pamphlet was a sort of bulletin of lectures given by different professors in the college. There was a star after several of the announcements and at the bottom of the page it said, "Open to the Public." I hadn't a notion whether it was the right thing for me to go to them or not, but one rainy afternoon I hunted up Tyler Hall and Room twenty-one on the second floor and slunk into one of the back chairs at five minutes to three, very much frightened and wondering if I would be turned out. The lecture was the second or third of a series given by a Dr. Van Breeze on something in philosophy. I didn't understand more than about two sentences, but no one seemed to question my right to sit there, and I felt ten times more comfortable than I ever had at bridge parties in Hilton.
You see I have never been to college. Although I hated boarding-school with all my heart and soul, I have always had a sneaking idea I might have done better at college. I always liked to study and when I became aware of the fact that Juliet—who, though the best and staunchest girl in the world, was never very brainy—was soaring above me in knowledge, I used to be a little envious. It may seem odd to you for a married woman to be trotting across a campus every other day to attend lectures in class-rooms, as if she were an undergraduate, but after my first plunge into that discourse on philosophy by Dr. Van Breeze I never missed a single lecture in the series. I went the next week and the next and the next; and also bolted bravely into a series of French lectures every Monday afternoon. I liked just to sit and breathe the air of those class-rooms. I liked the long line of blackboards covered with unintelligible words that belonged to a previous lecture, the row of felt erasers, the smell of dry chalk-dust. I liked sitting in those studious-looking chairs with a big arm on one side. It was as strange and foreign as a new country in those class-rooms, with the bare maple-tree branches grazing the window-pane, and in my ears the music of the French language which I hadn't heard since I left high school. I was a thousand, thousand miles away from the atmosphere of limousines and Edith, five hundred and two wedding presents, and a wedding-dress that cost two hundred dollars. It was like a distant echo from another world when I received an invitation for a bridge one day from a Mrs. Percival. It had completely escaped my mind that she was one of the individuals who had given me a dozen Dresden plates. Even if I had recollected I shouldn't have accepted the invitation. Why should I put handcuffs on myself again, now I was once free from a bondage that I loathed? I sent a very proper note of regret to Mrs. Percival, pleading a previous engagement. It was true. An old white-haired gentleman whom I often met at Dr. Van Breeze's lectures had asked me to sit beside him that particular afternoon at three o'clock in Tyler Hall.
I didn't tell Will about the lectures. He was usually busy at the medical school daytimes, and I was always at home when he arrived at six. I was ashamed to confess to Will that I, who never studied a science in my life, was presuming to attend lectures on the Geology of Fuels and Fluxes (for I took in everything that was starred), the Influence of Science upon Religion, and something about the Law of Falling Spheres. I hated to have him laugh at me, so I kept absolutely quiet on the subject of my ridiculous search for knowledge. I didn't even tell him about my new acquaintances.
The white-haired old gentleman and I developed quite a friendship. Every Thursday we used to walk home together as far as the Library, and he would explain things in the lecture that I didn't understand. He called me Pandora in fun because I was so inquisitive and couldn't bear to let things unknown to me alone. Once in a while a queer little man in a frock coat and a soft artist's tie would join us, and a woman—a Miss Avery in an ugly brown suit and a stiff linen collar like a man's. They used to think that my questions were the drollest things they had ever heard in their lives; but I couldn't help but feel that the sweet old man took quite a fancy to me. He gave me a book once on philosophy, by a famous scholar, and another time he asked me to come to his house to meet his wife. Naturally I didn't go, for I wouldn't have let any one guess I was Mrs. William Ford Maynard for all the wives in creation. It was a funny existence to drift into, wasn't it—cake and snow-pudding in the morning (I loved to mess about in the kitchen); economics, geology, philosophy and French in the afternoon; and evenings our open fire and cribbage with dear old Will, by the light of our big bronze lamp? It was a happy existence too.
I found something in those lectures of Dr. Van Breeze's which I had lost a long time ago. It was a precious thing and at first I didn't recognise it. You see every once in a while Dr. Van Breeze would say something that was better than anything I had ever heard in any church. I wasn't sure that I quite understood him, so I asked the old gentleman. It was a great eye-opener to me when I learned that such a great thinker as Dr. Van Breeze had a religion.
"Why, even I don't believe anything," I told my white-haired friend.
His little eyes twinkled at that. "And proud of it too, I'll wager," he laughed.
I blushed, for I think I did feel rather superior, just as I had felt wise when I knew there was no Santa Claus. Juliet and I had talked quite a good deal about religion. She took a course in "Bible" at college, which seemed to knock all the inspiration and the miracles out of it for her; and when it came to her course in philosophy, well—she said that she thought that ministers were a very credulous lot of men. She said you couldn't argue with them because they always wanted to prove things by quoting the Bible, while there existed simply dozens of other worthy reference books. She said that she preferred to rely on great scholars and philosophers for truth, rather than on men who only looked in one book for information. Naturally I didn't want to keep on believing in a fallacy, simply because I had never been to college. Childish as it may seem at first, I used to feel awfully unanchored not to say my prayers at night; but of course such a custom was silly, if I really was an unbeliever. I told my white-haired old friend in defence of my shocking statement (which by the way didn't shock him at all) that he might laugh, but anyhow I was backed up by scholars and philosophers, who since the year one had all been busy trying to prove that there wasn't anything in religion to believe.
"Why, my dear mistaken Pandora," smiled my friend. "On the contrary, philosophers have all been trying to prove there is something to believe, of some nature or other."
"Really?" I exclaimed. "It would be a big relief to me—but are you sure?"
"Did you ever hear of Benedict Graham?" he replied. Of course I had—every one has. He's at the head of the philosophy department at this university. The next week my friend presented me with Benedict Graham's "Introduction to Philosophy." I thought such a book would be way beyond my understanding, but it wasn't. I used to read a chapter or two by myself and then talk it over with my friend afterward. He made everything very simple to me and seemed besides to be an awfully well-informed old gentleman. I didn't think even Juliet could scoff at him, though he did believe a lot of things. After a week or two I felt rather ashamed at having so loftily pronounced myself an Unbeliever. I am no such thing! I can't tell you exactly what I am. I really don't know. But so long as minds ten times bigger and greater than mine (like Dr. Van Breeze and Benedict Graham, and lots of those learned old Greeks and Germans) so long as such intellects entertain the idea that there is something of some nature to believe in, I tell you, I'm going to believe in it with all my might and main.