Far from the Maddening Girls/Chapter 1
CHAPTER ONE
I was on the threshold, so to speak, of thirty when my Uncle Ezra gave his first evidence of being aware of my existence by leaving me a competency. He had never seen me, nor I him, and he mis-spelled my very name several times in the course of his will; but, nevertheless, he contrived, in this manner, to awaken in me what I may call a posthumous affection for him, which I have carefully cherished ever since. The justice of this sentiment will be clear when I say that by this fortuitous turn of his pen the estimable old gentleman had made practicable the most ardent desire of my heart.
I was utterly and consumedly weary of being a single man. I aspired to enter a more admired and more admirable estate; to have done with landladies and table d’hote dinners; to be sure, under all conditions, of finding a button where a button ought to be; to know the unspeakable wealth of comfort and seclusion which is miraculously packed into the limited compass of that little word “Home!” In short, I yearned to become a bachelor, and this was precisely what the benignant performance of my Uncle Ezra enabled me to do.
Perhaps it is necessary to explain that one cannot be a thoroughly authentic bachelor under five thousand a year. Short of that income, one may, of course, remain unmarried; but to remain unmarried means nothing more than to be a single man — a creature, that is, commonly supposed to be conditioned not so much by his inclinations as by material circumstance. Who, pray, is going to believe that he is single because he chooses to be, instead of because he must? He may have all the courage of his conviction, but he can never hope to impress others with the conviction of his courage. Possessing the keenest distaste for a life in the stocks or under the bonds of matrimony, he is yet as helpless to prove this aversion as would be a fresh egg to substantiate its very possible disinclination for becoming a chick.
“A single man, indeed!” says the world. “And why not, so long as his salary, as every one knows, is but thirty-five dollars a week? Humph! Just give him the means to marry upon, and let us see how soon our misogamist will change his mind!”
That is it. Give the egg an incubator, and see how long we shall have to wait before it turns into a chick, and begins to peep, and peck, and preen, in a manner identical with that of all chicks that have gone before! They have no one to believe in their claim to originality, the unhatched egg and the unmarried man! The world has the unique distinction of being too much with them and too much against them at one and the same time.
But the single man of means — whom I have chosen to distinguish as the bachelor proper — that is a very different story! Even the most skeptical must allow that he is the product of his inclinations, not of his restrictions. He is magnificent in his isolation, in his independence of that preposterous, corpulent little boy, with the wings and the bow and arrows, who sets half of the trouble in the world afoot. He knows what is best for him— yes, indeed! And, if he ever feels that it is necessary to his peace of mind to cumber himself with something which is, at once, exorbitantly costly and readily deranged, then I warrant you he will have the good sense to see that what he wants is an automobile, and not a wife. An automobile keeps up a continual clamour whenever you take it out: an automobile gets into the habit of blowing you up at regular intervals, and of running down your neighbours whenever opportunity offers: an automobile is forever in need of new and expensive trimmings and fittings — but then, you can always exchange an automobile for something useful. I can say all the rest of a wife — but I can’t say that!
A man once delivered me a homily on wedded bliss, taking as his text a bird’s nest which he had discovered in some shrubbery. He would have drawn tears from a stone with his picture of the fond couple building their little home, rearing the tender brood, and giving them lessons in singing and aerial navigation; and, finally, parting the shrubbery, he bade me look within.
“There’s a lesson for you!” he exclaimed triumphantly.
I told him he was quite right. Indeed, I never remember having been brought in contact with a more eloquent parable. The parent birds were from home, and the young ones were eagerly expecting their return. There was nothing in sight but bills! Forthwith, I determined to become a bachelor.
Now a bachelor, like all superior beings, has his responsibilities. Your mere single man may be content with a furnished room and a continual round of the restaurants; but it is incumbent upon the bachelor to make a more conspicuous success of the life to which he thus stands pledged. He must justify himself in the eyes of society. He must meet the boasted superiority of existence a deux on its own ground, and put it to rout with irrefutable demonstration. He must have a house, and equip and order this in such a fashion that the married couples for ten miles around will fall down with one accord and grovel. His peace and prosperity must be so evident and so eloquent as to cause the Green-eyed Monster to harry and lay waste that entire countryside. In short, he must preach with irresistible finality the fact that a man is happier without a wife than with one; and if so be that he arrives at the point of causing married women to sniff and married men to sigh, then he may know that his demonstration is a success and the lesson to be drawn therefrom unanswerable.
So, at the outset, I was confronted with the palpable necessity of building a house. Distinctly, there was no time to be lost, now that Uncle Ezra’s means were mine, for so long as a bachelor is not fairly and firmly entrenched in his stronghold there is a peril as inimical to his security as is the soft-spoken songbird to the unwary worm’s. I refer, of course, to the matchmaker — an affliction against which there is no law, no protection, and no remedy. She — I think the species boasts no male — resents the unmarried man as if he were a personal insult. From the moment when he crosses her path he is marked for the slaughter, and she begins to shuffle her kinsfolk and acquaintances as one shuffles the cards in the intellectual game of Old Maid, desperately endeavouring to find him a mate. She cannot, as the phrase aptly puts it, leave him “alone.”
In my own case, I protest there had been more matchmakers concerned than Briareus could have counted upon his fingers, and I was barely out of my ’teens when I learned to appreciate the force of the saying that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. And if this had been so when I was practically penniless, what had I not to fear now that I had a competency?
A surprising number of natural phenomena are enlisted in the matchmaker’s service. Moonlight, flowers, darkness, the woods, the sea, spring, music, poetry — all these, and many others, are her aids and accomplices. Her house is full of cushioned corners, and it is surrounded by piazzas, with vines and hammocks and I know not what other snares; and invariably there are girls visiting her with whom one is left alone at frequent intervals in the most surprising and disconcerting manner. Pitfalls are as thick as bones in a shad. You wouldn’t suspect a mandolin of designs upon your celibacy, would you? — or a philopena, or a piece of embroidery, or a fan, or a box of candies? Poor innocent! Put a girl behind it, and a matchmaker standing close- hauled in the offing, and each and every one of them has an awful, a fatal significance. There are strings to the mandolin: wretched man, there will soon be one to you. What is the philopena but a symbol of matrimony? The girl never pays. And the embroidery: look how the poor thing is stretched and pulled and held in absolute bondage — with a ring! And the fan is shut up twenty times of an evening, and seen through the rest of the time. And the box of candies disagrees with you. So there! There is something that suggests a wife or a husband in every one of them. And when a man begins to dally with them, the first thing he knows the charm has worked, and he has popped, and been gobbled up, for all the world like an overheated kernel of corn! His only safety, I repeat, is to escape visiting the matchmakers by building a house of his own, in which, perceptibly, there is no room for a wife. It is an expression of conviction, this, and shows him to be so firm in his resolution that there is small hope of dislodging him.
The admirable conduct of Uncle Ezra, then, made it possible for me thus to entrench myself in a dwelling, the atmosphere of which I proposed should resemble that of the Garden of Eden before the appearance of Eve; and, to this intent, I perceived that it must be one in which it would be manifestly impossible for a married couple to exist in anything akin to comfort. In this way only could I expect to make it plain that I was not in the matrimonial market, or likely ever to be.
Now there are two things about a house which are as necessary to a woman as light or air. One is commodious closet-room and the other is a bath-tub. A man can stow his apparel in the veriest cupboard, and a shower-bath will give him more solid satisfaction than all the tubs in Christendom; but a woman must have as many hooks as Argus had eyes, and as for a shower-bath, there is nothing in the world over which she makes a greater to-do than wetting her hair. I determined, as the initial specification of my house, that there should not be a place to hang so much as a single skirt, and that the bathing arrangements should be limited to a shower and a slatted floor. A woman would think twice, I reasoned, before setting her cap at a man with a domicile so curiously limited.
It may appear to have been an extravagant precaution, and I might be asked why I could not rely upon the strength of my resolution; but, where matrimony is the peril to be avoided, there is no such thing as a superfluous safeguard. The most cautious of us have our moments of carelessness or abstraction, and, more than once, one of the afore-described combinations of a maiden, moonlight, and midsummer madness, had affected me with a horrid dizziness, a feeling, too distressing for utterance, that I was upon the point of proposing. It is a kind of emotional vertigo, this, a rush of romance to the head, and, once experienced, the very thought of its possible recurrence is indescribably alarming. I was like a man who has been threatened with smallpox: I felt that I could not get my fill of vaccination. The only adequate measure was to make myself as ineligible as possible; and I knew that I had taken a long stride in this direction when I eliminated the bath-tub.
Behold me, then, fairly launched upon my plans. I drew them with the utmost care, upon a fair sheet of paper, and, on a morning to be marked with a white stone, proceeded with my design in my pocket to the office of an architect of my acquaintance.
One of the most surprising things about an architect is the number of houses upon which he is engaged. I had always looked upon houses as something which one would be apt to build one at a time, like a cup challenger or a soldier’s monument, and, in consequence of this impression, I was prepared to find the architect in question highly gratified at the receipt of my order. It certainly never occurred to me, considering the number of architects, that there were enough houses to go round; but I found him already committed to no less than nine, of which an amazing number of young men in shirt-sleeves were drawing the details in white ink on sheets of blue paper.
Arbuthnot — such was his name — was inclined to be sniffy, as he looked over my plan. It was extraordinary, after all my thought, what a lot of things I had done wrong, I only remember one, at the moment, but that was serious. There was no visible means of getting into the kitchen from the exterior of the house, so that, as Arbuthnot slightingly remarked, it would be necessary to build the cook into the dwelling, and admit the butcher and the baker by way of the chimney. It occurred to me that the problem of keeping a cook in the country would thus be very happily solved, but I contented myself with asking him to correct my errors, and let me have the plans at the earliest possible moment. The earliest possible moment, it appeared, was two weeks distant.
I was exceedingly annoyed at this, for I wanted the plans immediately, as one always wants what one is only recently able to afford, but my exasperation was as nothing compared with my dismay at Arbuthnot’s next remark.
“Where is the house to be?”
Will it be believed that this question had never entered my mind? It had been a veritable château en Espagne, a castle in the air. I stared at him blankly, and had not a word to say.
As being immaterial to the present simple narrative, I will not dwell upon the perplexity incidental to the problem thus presented, further than to say that the ensuing fortnight was spent in a desperate search for a suitable location. At one time it seemed more than probable that the house would be entirely completed before I should have found a place to put it; and I fancy there could be nothing more embarrassing than to have an adult, able-bodied house on one’s hands, without so much as a, square foot of terra firma whereupon to place it. One might as well live in a balloon.
But, finally, the proper situation was discovered, and after the title had been searched — whether for smuggled goods or concealed weapons I have not the most remote idea — I found myself in a position to become proprietor of three acres of land, of which, to my thinking, the most dazzling attraction was the fact that the nearest neighbour was a mile away. However, I may make a note, in passing, of a paradox which I was very shortly to discover. It is this. A mile is the most elastic measurement in existence. If the person at the other end of it is one whom you dislike, it is no more protection against his company than if it were a hundred-yard dash; if, on the contrary, you like him, and wish to see him at frequent intervals, that mile which separates you from him might as well be the diameter of the earth. It is only the most disagreeable persons who are always within reach.
My first glimpse of the land which was now at my disposal was on one of those April days which summer seems to send out in the manner of tradesmen’s samples — “If you like this style of weather, we are now prepared to supply it in any quantity,” etc. I did like the style enormously. As I passed up the quiet country road to which I had been directed by the agent, I observed with pleasurable emotion that everything in sight was touched with fresh green, and that the air was full of the twitter of birds. Spring in the country, I said to myself, is a very different thing from spring in the city. It is the trees that leave, instead of the people; the birds’ eggs that are laid, instead of the evil-smelling asphalt pavements; and the lawn-sprinklers that play, instead of the hand-organs. I felt that I had made a wise decision, as I turned a corner and came in sight of what I was sure was the land I contemplated buying. It formed a slight rise from the level of the road — and at the summit of the rise was perched a rock — and on the summit of the rock was perched — a girl! I felt precisely as if I had found a fly in the cream-jug. If there is a place of all places where a fly’s presence is bound to be unappreciated, it is in the cream; and if there was a place of all places where a girl’s was inappropriate, it was in the geometrical centre of the three acres upon which I purposed to build “Sans Souci.” I had already chosen this as the name of my prospective temple to celibacy. “Sans Souci” — Without Disquiet! It seemed to me to express admirably the spirit of existence without hairpins and without “in-laws.”
The girl and I surveyed each other for an instant in silence. She was one of those girls who prove, if they prove anything, that clothes do not make the man. With the sole exception of her shortish walking-skirt, there was no visible article of her apparel which had not been plagiarised from something distinctly masculine. She wore a broad-brimmed felt hat, and a stock, and a man’s belt, and a Norfolk jacket, and dogskin walking-gloves turned back at the wrists, and heavy shoes with the soles protruding all around like little piazzas. She was what sensible people call bold-looking, and poets call debonair; and, altogether, she was a type to which I had a violent objection. At that first glimpse of her I thought she was one of the best reasons for not getting married which had ever come under my attention. I bowed stiffly, and inquired where I could find Mr. Berrith’s property.
“You can find some of it on top of this rock,” she retorted. “I’m his daughter.”
I explained with dignity that the particular property to which I referred consisted of three acres which were for sale for building purposes, and, in reply, she indicated her immediate surroundings with a little wave of her hand.
“Father was to have been here to show you the place,” she said, “but he was unexpectedly detained in town. I’m Miss Berrith. I came over in his stead to save you the annoyance of walking a mile to the house.”
“Thank you,” I answered, smothering my desire to say that, in respect to annoyance, a miss is as bad as a mile.
There was something in her presence which robbed the occasion of half the pleasure I had expected to derive therefrom. I had been looking forward to rambling about at will, and ruminating upon the improvements I would make, and the probable aspect of the completed house. I had not even looked for Mr. Berrith’s company. And now — a girl was added, my solitude divided, my perplexity multiplied, and my enjoyment subtracted, in this, my first problem in Berrithmetic. It was only natural, perhaps, that my next remark should have verged upon the idiotic.
“I am a single man, Miss Berrith.”
“I assure you, I didn’t take you for twins,” she replied with what I thought most uncalled for levity. “You needn’t explain, Mr. Sands; we’ve heard all about you from the agent. You seem to have been very frank with him.”
I had. I realized it with a qualm of uneasiness, and found myself wondering how much of my conversation the imbecile had seen fit to repeat.
“You are a confirmed bachelor?” continued Miss Berrith. “Don’t be alarmed. It’s a complaint which can be remedied.”
“It’s not a complaint at all!” I exclaimed indignantly. “It’s a heartfelt thanksgiving. So this is the land?”
“From the big fir tree on the left,” she explained, “to the clump of white birches on the right, and as far back as the little stream.”
It was a delicious prospect, wholly uncultivated, and instinct with charming possibilities. In my delight I permitted myself a most injudicious burst of enthusiasm.
“Here is where I can raise the house!” I cried, pointing to the knoll.
“Here,” she said gravely, “is where you certainly can’t raise anything else. It’s all ledge.”
I made the fatal mistake of attempting to be facetious.
“How about self-raising flowers?”
Fatal, I say, because she promptly adopted my weak-kneed little joke, gave it a pat on the back to stiffen its limpness, washed its face, tidied its hair, retied its cravat, brushed its boots, and, in general, furbished it up into something really worth while. This is what it was at the end of the operation:
“You can only raise flowers with an exposure to the west, just as you can only raise flour with an exposure to the yeast. So you see it is principally a question of what kind of house you propose to build, in what position you intend to build it, and how much land it is designed to cover.”
Here I made another error, more fatal than the last. The subject so interested and absorbed me that at the slightest reference to my house I gave forth confidences as freely as a sugar-maple gives forth sap. The young person on the rock having, as I may say, thus driven in the spigot, I bled views on single blessedness unreservedly, confiding in her as I had confided in Uncle Ezra’s solicitor, in my architect, in the real estate agent — as I am confiding, gentle and tactful reader, in you! I said to her all that is hereinbefore set down, and, further, with broad and comprehensive sweeps of my walking-stick, I sketched “Sans Souci” for her, as I proposed to place it, upon the swell of ground. Meanwhile, I forgot that I was talking to a girl.
“And so,” I concluded, “I shall be as safe in the midst of these charming woods as ever was Professor Garnier in his cage in the African jungle. I shall not even be forced, as he was, to listen to the daily chatter of inferior beings, and I can defy the most enterprising of man-eating spinsters to lay her claws upon me!”
As I paused I felt that, perhaps, I had been too emphatic. A woman always takes general theories as immediately applicable to herself. Hers has none of that broad, liberal view of the abstract which distinguishes the masculine mind. I was not wrong. Miss Berrith’s reply bordered on the contemptuous.
“Then there is no chance at all for me?”
“My dear young lady!” I said generously, “present company, you know — ”
“Is always accepted? Thank you. How unfortunate for me that present company does not always propose!”
“With me,” I said, “all this is a matter of principle.”
“Your principal,” she answered, “is likely to draw liberal interest from those to whom you confide it. Society, hereabouts, has not much in the way of diversion. We shall all, I am sure, watch with curiosity the progress of your experiment. Already, I find myself advantageously enlightened. I’ve always heard a wife referred to as the better half.”
“Please remember,” said I, “that we have not been talking of a married man’s better half, but of a bachelor’s better quarters.”
“True,” said Miss Berrith, dryly. “What a future is yours! It reminds me of what Tennyson says: ‘Ah, what shall I be at fifty should Nature keep me alive, if I find the world so bitter when I am but twenty-five?’”
“Irrelevant,” I retorted. “We were speaking of the change I propose to make.”
“Precisely,” remarked Miss Berrith. “What is change if not halves and quarters and fifties and twenty-fives?”
Once more I felt that she had the best of me, and I was correspondingly relieved when she took her departure, promising to acquaint her father with my desire to meet him at the agent’s on the following day to conclude our bargain. I was gratified to note that, five minutes later, I preserved no recollection of her face beyond the fact that she had good teeth and freckles on her nose.
Sometimes, in the course of an uncommonly good dinner, you may have added to your enjoyment of its delicacies by an endeavour to realize how differently you would feel as a pauper, munching on a crust. It was in somewhat the same spirit that I seated myself upon the rock which she had left, looked about at the land upon which “Sans Souci” was soon to stand, and strove to appreciate what would have been my sensations had I been doomed to share it with a wife.
Primarily, as a bachelor, I was able to indulge in many little luxuries which would have been manifestly impossible if I had been under the necessity of supplying some one with pin-money; and I felt that these I should enjoy the more for thinking to what uses married men are compelled to apply their cost. Never, I thought, would I use my telephone, for example, without a sense of exultation in the knowledge that its annual rental only approximated the cost of an Easter bonnet.
A wife! I saw myself paying for Parisian dresses, loaded with flounces, and gores, and chiffon, and selvages, and passementerie — whatever that maybe! — and such-like frippery. I saw myself listening to curtain-lectures. In accuracy’s name, why “curtain”? — since they are opened instead of closed just as you want to go to sleep. I saw myself wearing the ties of marriage — those unspeakable ties which women buy at bargain-sales! In short, I saw myself a slave, shuddered, and shook myself into the magnificent realization that it wasn’t true!
Oh, “Sans Souci!” No hairpins, no curlpapers, no piano practice, no hysterics, no jealousies, tantrums, amateur cooking, threats (always unmercifully unfulfilled) of Going Back to Mother! No tea-parties, no sewing-machines, no tears, sick headaches, cheap novels, smelling salts! No misapplication of the nail-scissors to the sharpening of pencils, no undue expenditure of money which I could not spare for Christmas presents which I did not want! Oh, “Sans Souci!” — emblem of prosperity, peace, and placidity — a change for the better, and let who would make the awful other change, for better for worse. Oh, “Sans Souci!” — “Sans Souci!” — “Sans Souci!”
My little rhapsody over, I prepared to leave my imminent domain. As I rose from my seat upon the rock, something small and white at my feet attracted my attention, and I picked it up. It was a handkerchief — the most preposterously inadequate handkerchief I had ever seen, or hoped not to see. For a postage-stamp, or even a baggage tag, its proportions might not have been absurd. As a handkerchief, it was a distinct farce, folly, and fiasco. In the corner of this ridiculous article, elaborately embroidered, was one word — “Susie.”
As a matter of curiosity, I would like to know whether there is authentic record of a single instance in which a man has left his handkerchief on top of a rock, a mile from the nearest neighbour.