O Genteel Lady!/Chapter 4
She saw fall come to Boston. The elms grew yellow and early relinquished their leaves, as if, thought Lanice, they were proud of their shapely trunks and limbs and so put on a clothing of leaves late in the spring and laid them aside early in the fall. Unlike the oak, which clings to its rough coating of leaves as long as possible, the elms have no ugly twists or growths to cover.
Ladies of fashion, for such there were in Boston, although Lanice never saw them either in the offices of Redcliffe & Fox nor at Pauline's meetings and institutes, swept up the leaves that fell upon the Great Mall and the Little Mall with their fine, full skirts. That year their dresses were the colors of autumn leaves—burnt orange, dull crimson, russet, and a bright, light green, the shade of the winter rye which Lanice knew in country places was rising fiercely out of the ground. The beautiful Paisley shawls, which they carried more than actually wore, were also of the colors of the dying year. That fall the hoops were enormous, and if two met in a doorway, one must stand back, and there was started an agitation requiring the horse-car companies to enlarge the entrances and exits of their vehicles. Now and then in Philadelphia or New York, and sometimes nearer home, one of these fine ladies would catch fire. The yards and yards of material spread upon the hoops burned like tinder. The lady was instantly enveloped in a rising curtain of fire, and no adoring elegant beau in plaid waistcoat and pantaloons could save her. Lanice knew that once your skirt brushed across the lighted hearth you were doomed to die cruelly. Yet like the other ladies she accepted the danger and inconvenience, and like them she walked a little stiffly and consciously. She was conscious not only of her billowing clothes but of the burden of her ladyhood, and she carried herself as she might some rare and fragile thing, almost too precious to trust to its own feet. But sometimes she was more conscious of the gross skeleton beneath the transient elegancies of her toilette, the satin skin and delicately modeled flesh. He (for to her all skeletons were male) waited within and knew that some time all else would be gone and then he would come forth, grinning. As her fingers felt for him, she grew afraid and resentful, and turned with timid desperation to other more cheerful thoughts.
In spite of the burden of her own ladyhood and Miss Bigley's ideals, she at last asked Mr. Fox for a corner of her own in the warren of Redcliffe & Fox. All the younger gentlemen laid off their tight coats and helped move the two ceiling-high bookcases that were to cut off a small cubby-hole for the 'captive artist.' Mr. Fox insisted that the backs of the bookcases, which made two of Lanice's walls, should be painted soft green to match her portièred entrance. When the paint was dry he helped her tack up some hundred colored plates from 'Hearth and Home.'
The Rockingham water-cooler, with a pewter cup chained to it, was next moved into her room. It pleased Mr. Fox to say that it was the cleanest spot in the place and therefore should hold the water-supply. Most of Lanice's impressions of her associates were gained by seeing them stand by the water-cooler with the chained pewter mug in their hands, chatting with her as they sipped. Only 'Old Blowhard,' as the senior and most serious partner was generally called, never stopped for a word. He was a choleric, rather handsome old fellow whose tumbled white whiskers always seemed to be blowing in the whirlwind of his personality. Mr. Trelawney came and drank. His leanness and square chops made him slightly resemble a thin black torn cat. His eyes, almost as dark as Lanice's own, were far more romantic. As he drank he would chat a little about the oddities of literature which interested him intensely. It was from him that she first heard of the Decameron. Although the kindest of men, he thought it was good for young ladies to be shocked. In fact, he thought anything was better than being a 'lady' in Lanice's sense of the word.
Sometimes gentle Whittier would be led in for a drink, or the philosopher Emerson, who, although he listened with a saintly courtesy, seemed by the very force of his wisdom to impose silence upon others. She spoke once to Mr. Fox about this barrier which stood between Mr. Emerson and the world. 'He feels it himself, too, poor soul,' said Mr. Fox. 'The wise ones on earth pay a terrible price for their wisdom.' Occasionally little Dr. Holmes would come frisking in; he was as merry as a cricket and bubbling over with stories about his medical students at Harvard where he said he did not have a 'chair,' merely a 'settee.' Professor Longfellow at first disappointed her. She had expected a tall man, and thought his large, beautiful head misplaced on his smallish body. Later she, like every one else, thought him the handsomest of men.
All that fall, as the yellow leaves dropped from the elm trees on the Common and the chill in the air at last forced the ladies to assume their Paisley shawls, Lanice heard continually of a new and spectacular star that had risen in England. This wonder had the commonplace name of Anthony Jones. The man had been a captain in India, and had, six years before, been sent North into Arabia to buy breeding-stock for the Indian cavalry. Instead he, and the regiment's money, had remained in Arabia. Something in the man, no one knew quite what, had appealed to the Bedouin tribes and he had mastered their language, for he was a born linguist. He had become a Mohammedan and some sort of a prince. His translations from the brutish but beautiful Arab poetry, 'Garden of the Jin,' had made a name for him in eclectic literary circles and the stamina and courage the man had shown in forcing his wild tribesmen to support England in a series of small crises had won him his young Queen's gratitude. In England his lectures had been sensational, although the Queen, who had granted him certain public honors, refused to meet him socially.
Mr. Fox, working through Sears Ripley, whose interest in Oriental literature had brought him into contact with Jones, and the English publishers, Clapyard & Dunster, persuaded him to come to America on a lecture tour. Redcliffe & Fox would publish the American edition of his great book, 'Sands of Araby.' Ripley and Jones had corresponded for years over details of Arabic. Once they had met for a few days in Smyrna. There was a bond between the two men, and they were, strangely enough, friends. The conservative, steady Harvard professor secretly admired the wild young Englishman whom, however, he never felt he could 'quite trust.' Jones had a rather simple nature and liked Ripley largely because he knew that this distinguished scholar liked him.
'Miss Bardeen,' said Sears Ripley, 'you must meet Anthony Jones.' He was sitting in the largest of her two red leather chairs and sharpening her drawingpencils with exquisite nicety into the waste-basket he had drawn between his knees. Lanice considered Jones unprincipled and 'loose,' and did not like the way the men gloated over the fact he was a professed believer in polygamy and kept women 'in their place.' She continued sketching at her desk, presenting a stiff, uncompromising back to Professor Ripley.
'I am sure we will have nothing in common,' she replied.
'I know, but that is why you should meet him. You say you want to be a novelist, and if so, some time, you may want to put in some such gallant rascal as our friend Jones. Yet you are afraid to meet him.'
'Even you, who are his friend, call him a rascal.'
'Yes, he considers himself one. The fellow is a born advertiser. He knows that being a Mohammedan, with a reputation for...adventure, is good business. Miss Bardeen, I believe you are the only lady in Boston who is not languishing to meet him. This is certainly a case of casting the swine before the pearl.' Both laughed and Lanice swung about. She tipped back her head a little, and for some reason suddenly looked pretty.
'Bring him in, by all means. "Hearth and Home" might run a series of articles about how they make bread and bring up children and marry in Arabia.'
'Everything that is fit for a lady to know about Arabia.'
'That's what I don't like about the man and his nasty country,' said Lanice rather hotly. 'Mr. Fox and Mr. Trelawney, you, every one, are always suggesting that there is so much that a lady shouldn't know, I think I'd rather know nothing. But bring him in. It will be, after all, but a business meeting.'
Three days later, her sage-green portières were pushed aside. Sears Ripley and a strange young man stood side by side before her. Any one to have seen the two would have selected the Bostonian, with his height and width, dark beard and small, wise eyes, as the great traveller linguist, and master of men. In comparison Jones looked boyish and shy. He was only an inch or two taller than Lanice and as slender as the Arabs whom he had led. The set of his shoulders, however, suggested army training. His mouth drooped slightly and was too short for the blunt, broad cast of his features. In comparison to the expressive eyes, mournful and intelligent as a hound's, the mouth seemed inarticulate. Before Sears Ripley had begun the introduction, she put her hand out timidly towards him. 'Captain Jones,' she said, and flushed when she felt his hard hand, small for a man, close over hers. Sears Ripley murmured a belated introduction and suddenly hated to see Jones's hand upon the girl's. The Englishman hesitated before he spoke, almost as though he once had had an impediment in his speech to laboriously overcome, then said:
'You are the young lady who is going to write things up...' he paused—'for a female magazine. Ripley thinks you may even...invent an "Anthony Jones antimacassar" for your readers to knit. I am delighted.'
Professor Ripley laughed and looked at his inexplicable friend with proprietorial eyes, and then glanced at Lanice as if to say, 'Isn't this a fine fellow, if one does not take him too seriously?'
'We've only five minutes now,' he said, 'before we all go over to the Parker House to eat some of the famous oysters.' He stopped to tell of Thackeray's visit to the same hostelry a few years before, and how the oysters were so large he insisted they looked like the High Priest's ear which Peter had cut off, and when he finally got one down, said he felt as if he had swallowed a baby. Captain Jones's face lighted up almost merrily and his mouth, which in repose looked as if it could never smile, widened.
'I must indeed...have some of these gigantic ears to eat.'
While Sears Ripley went about the building gathering together the diners, the lady editoress talked with Jones. To find herself alone with him and responsible for his amusement frightened her. Her heart raced a little and she felt secret excitement. What an unprincipled, loose young man! She had expected to hate him, but he was disarmingly without Byronic poses. Why did every one say he was such an advertiser and liked to make capital of his ill-spent life? She thought his wide-open grey eyes the frankest and in a way the most innocent she had ever seen in the head of a mature man.
He spoke to her in his suave, hesitating way, asking what she had in mind and whether the material he was willing to give her for her female magazine could not be used in such a way as to increase the sales of 'Sands of Araby.'
'I must make the thing sell. I need...the money to support myself as I am accustomed to living in Arabia. That is why I am lecturing...so extensively. And in native costume. People must say'—he mimicked slightly the clipped speech of fashionable English society—'"he is so picturesque, and have your read his utterly...devastating book?" That is why,' said Mr. Jones, 'I let people over here call me "Sir Anthony."...I couldn't do that in England, they'd know. But in New York, why, I say don't call me "Captain," call me "Jones." And they come back with "Sir." By the time I reach Pittsburgh I will be...a lord. And I'll not go to Cincinnati, whatever that may be, for less than...a belted earl.' He watched her attentively and when she smiled a very little, he smiled too. She made some remarks about 'Hearth and Home.' His eyes maintained their look of sadness and faithfulness. He let her finish and then asked her abruptly about herself. Did she like office life? Was she a Boston girl? Did she write stories and draw pictures herself? Lanice answered his gentle cross-questioning rather fully. Shy herself, the great traveller's hesitating speech made her feel poised and sophisticated. She was quite sure that she liked him and could not understand why even his friend, Professor Ripley, considered him a rascal.
'Did any one ever tell you,' he asked, 'that you are much the type of certain Persian princesses...often painted by artists of the Mughal School...a type...which, if it ever did exist, does not exist now?' He did not tell her how his restless eyes had roved over the earth looking for this evasive beauty in the flesh.
Sears Ripley's manly head appeared between the portieres. It was time the gentlemen assumed their capes and ate their midday oysters. Lanice said quickly, in a very low voice, 'The daughter of an old East India merchant gave me a miniature...Hindoo, I think. She said it looked like me.'
'May I see it?'
'I'll bring it in.'
'No, no. I will call.'
The girl looked up at him out of meek, frightened eyes.
'I'd so much rather bring it in.'
'Of course,' he said, 'do what you want and don't let me bully you.'
He smiled, and his smile was devastating and joyous, an incredible performance for his sombre face. Sears Ripley saw their eyes meet, and in some way lock together. He saw Miss Bardeen's sleek, shapely head settle back slightly upon the neck which swelled and took on curious beauty. He realized for the first time in his life that the girl could at mysterious moments assume an almost wanton loveliness, and his curiosity was deeply stirred. He looked at Captain Jones. He, too, had discovered the girl's fleeting but haunting beauty. Then, quite without warning, she put on the expression of a perfect lady. The look irritated Captain Jones. She was probably a most banal young lady, and a female editor at that, a foul bluestocking! It seemed to him unfortunate that she of all the women in the world should possess at moments the look of a Mughal princess. Well, as his American publisher, Mr. Fox, would say, 'that was that.'
It was Sears Ripley who could not eat his oysters. He was sorry that he had introduced these two friends, and that their eyes had locked together. Late in the afternoon he restlessly crossed and re-crossed the Common between the Poggy mansion and the publishing house. He noticed that at last the trees were quite bare of leaves and that small crystals of ice were forming on the Frog Pond. Stepping down the long walk, cheerful, amused, and wide awake to all the world, was Dr. Holmes in his little brown gaiters.
At last Lanice came towards him dressed in a short, bottle-green jacket trimmed with bright green fringes. She carried a little muff of the same materials. The man, his high beaver hat in his hand, joined her. She noticed that he always wore square dark blue clothes almost like a sailor's, as if he was proud of his nautical blood.
'You cannot tell me, Miss Bardeen,' he said after a dozen steps and a few words about the weather, 'that you found the great Mr. Jones as repellent as you expected.'
'Oh, it's always Captain Jones! I'm tired of him already. Is he not quite an insignificant-looking man to have had such an interesting life? But, of course, you are his friend...'
'Oh, that's all right, sav what you please. I think in a way I understand and like the man. Criticisms will not make any difference.'
'Then you will not mind if I say that I...' she paused, and a dark wave of anger seemed to rise up from below...'that I dislike him. I thought at least he would have a romantic exterior, like Byron, but...' she bent her head and pressed her muff against her mouth. 'If a man must be a Don Juan, he should look the part.'
Sears Ripley looked at her quizzically. A man of no moods himself, he had a gift for understanding the most changeable and moody of people, especially women.
'Was he in this afternoon?' he asked curiously.
'I don't know; I didn't see him.' The showman in him was sorry that Lanice had not appreciated Anthony Jones. But all the rest of him was glad. He could not understand the violent aversion which she evidently felt. His curiosity was intensely piqued. For the first time since the death of his wife, Prunella, he found himself thinking continuously of a woman.
Late in the evening he and Captain Jones sat in the library of Professor Ripley's Concord house drinking port and eating cake. The old mahogany table was spread with manuscripts in Arabic and with dictionaries. Ripley grew sleepy and twice suggested bed. Jones was as alive as a cat and his wide eyes glittered when the firelight caught in them. There was a delicate sense of excitement about him which, tired as Professor Ripley was, he found contagious.
Finally, without warning, the Englishman abruptly announced, 'I've an idea that Redcliffe & Fox's intellectual young lady may really be a perfect fool.'
'That's because you think all ladies fools.'
'Oh, no. I think the Arab women very wise.'
'Oh, shut up, Jones. You are not talking to scandalize the newspapers.'
They sipped their port, and Jones ate his third piece of tipsy cake.
'Rather liked her.'
Ripley's heart contracted and sank. He was not sure he had understood. 'You what?'
'Liked her.'
The professor was conscious that all the waves of excitement he had felt emanating from Jones had Lanice Bardeen as their source. He felt very tired and rather worn and middle-aged. He said wearily, 'How flattering to Miss Bardeen.'
'What did you say her name was?'
'Miss Bardeen.'
'And her first name?'
'I am afraid I do not know,' Sears Ripley lied coldly.
The two men looked at each other. Jones smiled in a faint but friendly fashion.
'I don't want to ever see her again. There is something about her, a primness, a what you'd call a "virtue" that I find irritating. I can think of her as I saw her one moment and say truthfully she attracts me, but if I knew her everything would be spoiled.' On the evening of Captain Jones's Boston lecture the snow fell, the first snow of all the deep snows of that famous winter. It came without wind in great tattered flakes. In an hour it had padded the city with inches of silence. Runners replaced wheels and the cold music of the sleigh bells jingled in the crystalline air.
'I always forget snow is so thrilling,' said Mr. Fox, as he and Lanice, with their faces pressed against the panes, watched the whitening of the graveyard and the obliteration of the stones. Miss Bigley hurried in shaking the drifts out of her vast dolman and off her bonnet.
'I assure you, Miss Bardeen, the other ladies that serve as ushers are already gathered at my house to put on their costumes. Dear Mr. Jones, tired as he is, is assisting. Such brocades and gauzes and jewels were never before seen in this city.'
It had fallen upon Miss Bigley to select five girls of social eminence and sufficient beauty to usher at Mr. Jones's lecture. Mr. Jones himself had selected the sixth. Miss Bigley could not understand why he should choose one who was neither a belle nor an heiress, a mere stranger in Boston from Amherst. Lanice hurried into her wraps, tied down her bonnet, and fled to the hack waiting outside. Miss Bigley, talking breathlessly as they swished along over the snow, did not tell her that Mr. Jones, evidently scenting the social difference between Miss Bardeen from Amherst and the Boston-born Endicotts, Scollays, Lowells, and Sears, had put aside for her a dull heap of ancient garments, whose rosy copper and emerald green could not compare with the pink and blue gauzes of the other girls.
Jones was elsewhere and the other girls were dressed. Their glibness and intimacy with each other embarrassed Lanice and made her feel the outsider that she was. Miss Bigley flattered them and rolled her prominent blue eyes in admiration. Lanice, unassisted, found a small chamber where she could divest herself of her hoops and crinoline and pull on the odd straight garments. There were at least five layers, and they had been so folded, presumably by Miss Bigley and Mr. Jones's Hindoo servant that she could not mistake the order. Saffron first, then ivory, then cherry stuck all over with gold stars. White gauze next, and over it a reptilian coppery thing that suddenly gave out cold blue lights. Everything was exquisitely made, sewn with gold and seed pearls. About her waist she twisted a sash of purple and green.
A rap on the door. Miss Bigley coming at last to help her. 'Come in.'
Captain Jones, swathed in white like an Arab, and banded with gold, but with his characteristically European head uncovered and his hair looking tumbled and boyish, opened the door.
'That's it,' he said. 'You've got...the right order and this...old rag goes on top.' He stared at her with frank, innocent eyes. Only think, if he had come five minutes earlier! Lanice blushed at the thought. Mr. Jones had the same thought, but did not blush. He laid an armful of fluent gold across the chair. The girl had never guessed that such things existed. Fairy-land seemed possible. She put on a shapeless thing of metal cloth, embroidered all over with trailing Persian flowers and fruits, springing birds and leaping antelopes. It wrapped her closely as though its weight came from water, not gold.
Dazed and shy, she stole back to the parlor where the Captain, Miss Bigley, and the five enchanting girls chatted and waited until the time of departure. Miss Bigley rushed out breathless to meet her, and exclaimed over the number and the intricacy of the garments. Lanice read in her protruding eyes that the sumptuous golden overdress was inappropriate for an unpretentious editoress.
'Now, Miss Quincy, with all her wealth of golden hair...now really so much gold makes you look quite pale, Miss Bardeen, and Miss Quincy's costume is overplain, is it not?' Miss Quincy wore the four-hundred-year coat and Captain Jones evinced not the slightest interest in this change. Lanice wondered why he had given her this treasure. She guessed that her costume, so lifeless in a heap and so vital upon the body, was more precious than the modern hangings of the other young ladies. Now she was dressed as he had wished, but he only cast upon her a careless, roving glance and was entirely absorbed in the Scollay girls. Their father and handsome young uncle Lanice knew had made much of him.
There was a subtle manœuvring among the ladies, even Miss Bigley not being too dignified to hope she might ride in the closed sleigh with the dashing Captain. The two Scollays succeeded. They were pretty girls who seemed to have no jealousies towards each other. Lanice found them attractive and wished that she could know them. In the end Lanice and Miss Bigley rode to the lecture with Professor Ripley, who was second in command under Miss Bigley. Lanice withdrew to a dark corner of the hack and felt sad. Miss Bigley began to chatter about the duties of woman and the sanctity of the home. Sears Ripley, almost invisible, relaxed into sadness, but the occasional contact with his knees subtly comforted the younger woman. So they drove to Tremont Temple.
All during the evening, when Lanice had finished her rather nominal duties as usher, Ripley devoted himself to her. His eyes caressed her in a friendly fashion. Boston had accepted the occasion as one of distinction, meriting best black silks, real laces, and, in the case of the younger and more frivolous women, of voluminous flower-colored evening dresses trimmed with garlands of velvet and silver gauze flowers. The ten daily newspapers on the following morning referred to the lecture as a great social event unrivalled since the pure and lovely Jenny Lind had sung to Boston. The ushers were pronounced to be 'enchanting,' 'the loveliest of houris,' who combined the charms of the desert and of Boston. 'Many and many a night has passed since the commodious Temple has witnessed such a scene. Sir Anthony Jones, the bright star whose rising upon our firmament has been anxiously looked for by the fashionable astronomers since its transit across the ocean was announced, shone forth in all its brilliancy this evening. He was attended by some score of Boston nymphs who served as ushers in Asiatic dress and were pronounced the Brightest of Constellations.'
To all who had met Captain Jones in European garb and in the daily walks of life, his appearance on the rostrum was sensational. Lanice could not believe that this young man, who entered, swathed in white and banded with gold, aloof, speaking with the dignity and beauty of a prophet, could ever seem ill at ease or boyish. Now it was possible that he was a leader among savage men and that his courage, justice, and intelligence had taught them to respect the English nation. His face looked ruddy beneath the drooping white headgear bound about by rolls of camels' hair. His gestures were few and expressive. Sears Ripley explained to her in a whisper that he had that gift, rare among Englishmen, of listening for hours without speaking, as well as the commoner Anglo-Saxon quality of unflinching and, if necessary, cruel courage. She was very conscious of Ripley's generous admiration.
Jones told of his travels, mostly through the Great Red Desert in North Araby, and of the fine, lawless people that he found there. He did not tell by what means he became emir of five thousand tents, of thirty thousand people, nor from what source he drew the vast amount of gold pounds which it was evident he had spent. Lanice became more interested in him than in his smoothly flowing words. Behind him stretched the desert, a thing of infinite size and horror. Across it moved the white-shrouded fierce lancers of the desert, the red and blue tassels forming silken skirts before their horses' knees. She saw these men at daybreak, when the first clear rays stood level from the horizon, turn towards the sun and, without the prostrations and ablutions of the true Mohammedan, go through their own ancient rites until the orb was clear above the desert's edge. 'For they were Sun-worshippers before Mohammed came,' said Jones, 'and such they really are to-day. Their prophets have warned them that it is evil to salute the rising sun because at this time the Devil's horns appear. Nothing can change them. They know nothing of the pilgrimage to Mecca except how to plunder the pilgrims and are indifferent to the feast of Ramadan. They still sacrifice sheep and camels at the tombs of their ancestors.'
He spoke of the lakes of mirage, rising before one on all sides, quivering in the heat, nodding their phantom palm trees. 'Dreary land of death...little dried-up lizards looking as though they had never had one drop of water upon their ugly bodies.' And once travelling out from the Wells of Wokba he and his caravan had all but perished of thirst. For days fifteen or eighteen hours out of the twenty-four were spent on the camels crawling like flies on the black surface of the desert. Then, at midnight, three hours of tantalizing sleep broken so soon by the wise old guide standing in the door of the tent crying, 'Oh, master, if we linger we shall die.'
Oases with camels lying about, looking from a distance like 'teapots.' Tall, speechless women of the Badaweens, shrouded like ghosts standing sometimes six feet in their sandals. Patriarchs such as these solitary places have always bred since the days of Abraham.
He stood before her, clothed in the glory of his strange, bold life. The infinite spaces stretched behind him and the awful power of life and death was in his hard, square hands. In the sadness of his eyes and the silent disillusionment of his mouth was a philosophy older and deeper than taught by Mr. Emerson, who sat but three seats away. Under the compulsion of the smooth, low voice she felt little by little the moorings of her soul breaking and leaving her free to float off down some dreadful and beautiful river.
She was frightened by her own absorption, and tried to pull herself back. She said to herself desperately, 'If I fall in love with him it will kill me. I can't! I can't!'—and stared at him rather grimly. He was only a young Englishman in what she contemptuously called 'fancy dress,' advertising his new book and making money to go back to a country which, after all, seemed to be a travelling pigsty where no Christian 'man of principles' would want to live. She decided that all that was attractive about him was Arabia, and that Arabia was filthy. Its romance, of which Mr. Jones had nothing to say, was exaggerated. They were a lot of dirty people, black as Africans, and suffering from skin diseases, who wrote horrid poems, ate flour paste, rancid butter, and smelled of decay. And if this was all of Mr. Jones's charm, it was little enough. She whispered to Sears Ripley, 'He must have spoken for more than an hour and a half.' He looked slightly hurt, as one would if a member of one's own family had outtalked his welcome, and surreptitiously glanced at his Gorham watch.
'I think he feels so sure of his audience that he is talking a little overtime.'
'The people who live in Cambridge will miss the last horse-car.'
'Better that than Arabia.'
The voice went on. She felt stifled and was suddenly desperately anxious to leave the hall. If she did he might notice it and guess that she was bored. It might even hurt him. But, of course, he was so conceited nothing could do that. Professor Ripley moved slightly and his thick, navy-blue shoulder pressed against her silken one. He whispered to her gravely that the reason Jones was smooth-shaven except for an inch or so before either ear was the distaste the Arabs felt for a yellow beard.
No one except Mamma had ever hurt Lanice so much. She could not tell whether she liked him or hated him, but she knew he had the power to move her deeply, a power Augustus never had had, and temperate, friendly men like this nice Mr. Ripley could know nothing of. She struggled against the hold she felt he had upon her, and her natural egoism resented it. The instinct to submit to him warred bitterly against the desire for liberty and self-assertion. If she could have respected him, as for instance she respected Emerson, the battle would not have been so cruel. Sears Ripley felt her moving restlessly beside him. Never restless himself, he was patient and forgiving with her. He tried to encourage her with the information that the lecture must be nearly over because he now was talking about the French project of building a canal from Port Said to Suez. The best-informed in the audience, realizing the French and English rivalry at Suez, guessed without Jones's saying it that here was the real reason for his five years of freebooting through Arabia. Undoubtedly England had supported him as some sort of super-private agent and was the source of the gold which he had spent so freely.
The applause, muffled by the gloved hands of the gentlemen as well as the ladies, subsided, and Lanice was impatient to be gone. Miss Bigley was running back and forth throughout the audience striving vainly to herd together her ushers and get them into the two sleighs hired for the occasion, and back to her house, and so into their own clothes. The enchanting girls wished to stay for the impromptu reception that followed.
'Will you stop a minute, Miss Bardeen?' said Professor Ripley. 'I see a number of people whom I think you would enjoy.'
'I'd rather go to the hack and wait for the others,' she replied.
He did not urge her, but silently found the right sleigh, tucked her up with bear robes, and bowing, left her.
Alone in the dark she tried to forget the strange moment when she had felt the moorings begin to break within her and the fear that she might come to love this man had terrified her. Absurd, of course. There was no reason why she should love him more than another one. And her code did not permit a lady to love a man previous to his 'declaration.'
It seemed hours later that quite suddenly and softly the door opened, and not Miss Bigley, but Captain Jones himself entered, shaking the snow that still fell in tatters from his white headgear. He turned towards a bevy of young dandies who escorted him. 'Yes, good-night,' he called, and, 'Yes, interesting country...oh, no, not too difficult...thank you, yes.' The coachman cracked the whip, the frozen runners held against the first pull of the horses, then broke loose with a jerk. Slowly and casually he turned to his companion. She was humiliated to think that he might believe she was intentionally lying in wait for him, and instantly and rather ungraciously began to explain that she had understood that this was the sleigh reserved for the ushers.
'Yes,' he said, 'but I travel with the ushers, you know.'
'Should we not wait for the others?'
'No. Miss Bigley got them off all piled up in the other sleigh half an hour ago. Ripley told me he had put you in here. I thought you would be so kind as to wait for me.'
'Oh, of course,' she said quickly.
'And I've told the driver to make a turn up Washington Street. I do hope I am not inconveniencing you.'
'Oh, no. No.'
A dark, inscrutable silence lapsed between them which perhaps he did not care to break and which Lanice could not. Her heart had unaccountably sunken when she had seen Jones bow his head and enter the hack, shaking the snowflakes from him. Now it was beating fast and high up within her, and she was afraid he might hear it. Tardily she remembered that she had not said one word about the lecture, but found it hard to express what she felt. The words sounded stilted and labored. He accepted her praise good-naturedly, but as if it meant nothing to him, and again the darkness and the silence pressed upon them. Once he drew the bear rugs up about her and, leaning towards her, frankly inhaled with delight the rosy fragrance of her garments. The strong, odd perfume had puzzled and slightly embarrassed the New England girl. She murmured an apology.
'Good God!' he exclaimed, almost with irritation and none of his usual diffidence, 'that perfume is one of the wonders of the world. Not Arab, of course—there's nothing subtle about the Arab nose—but Persian. It's what our mutual friend, Mr. Ripley, would call decadent, but even...from my lecture platform, I could see his nostrils quiver like the wings of a butterfly about to light.'
Lanice visibly offended drew back. Anthony relaxed sullenly. She forgot that she had been afraid she might love him. He had almost forgotten that at a few odd moments she could be cruelly beautiful. Nothing but a rascal, as Mr. Ripley had said. Only another of these ridiculous high-minded 'civilized' women, and an editoress at that!
Mr. Jones had his own latchkey and let himself into the Bigley house. inside, his unacclimated shivering Hindoo, an affectation he had procured for himself in London, was packing up the discarded costumes of the ushers and setting out coffee for his master. So the dismal waiting in the cold hack had really been almost as long as it had seemed. The others had come and gone, and Miss Bigley, so the servant said, and her venerable father had gone to bed. Later Lanice heard that Miss Bigley 'understood' that Miss Bardeen had felt ill and had gone home immediately after the lecture.
Jones showed his teeth and spoke in a foreign language. He pointed to the hearth. The Hindoo busied himself until the orange flames leaped up and colored the room. He and his master drew the big sofa close to the fire. The horsehair upholstery displeased Jones, who ordered an India shawl to be spread upon it.
Lanice wished to leave, but did not know how to go about it. To take his priceless Persian garments home with her even for the night seemed an imposition, but she could not find a way to retire to her dressing-room. The coffee was served, a thick, delicious syrup in tiny cups of gold and turquoise. Jones grew warm. He threw back his headgear that during the lecture had drooped so becomingly about his sturdy face and with a careless gesture pushed back the layers of cloth upon his throat and chest.
'Are you warmer, Lanice?' How had he learned her name. How dared he use it?
'The fire,' she said primly, 'is very vigorous.'
'Yes.'
Conversation sickened, but there was a false undertone to its weakness that suggested a strategic retreat before attack. The girl had disappointed Jones. In the Persian dress she seemed almost wholly the editoress disguised as an ancient princess, while in hoops and plaid taffeta the disguise had seemed the other way around. The ruddy fire distorted shadows and burned orange in the folds of his white wool wrappings. It glittered on his chest which lay for some inches bare to the heat. The spectacle of so much firm clean skin revolted her, who was trained to believe that the body is in itself evil. Such a lack of collar, cravat, and waistcoat was disgusting. As she turned, and as the fire leaped, cruel blue lights, bright rosy copper flamed in her robes. The man could have laughed as he noticed the mincing kid shoe with elastic inserts below the robes of an odalesque.
He stared at her face, and she turned it towards him, the light catching in her lacquered black eyes.
'It must be really very late, I fear. May I not send you these garments to-morrow?'
He started to reply, but his eye fell upon her earrings. They were filigree pitchers and struck him as ugly, inappropriate, and quite inadequate for her voluptuous clothing. He said, 'I know what is wrong, it is those earrings.'
Calling his servant he addressed him again in jargon.
'Indeed, I must go.'
'No, no, not yet.'
He smiled delicately.
'I will not call you "Lanice" again. I only did it to see if I could either anger or embarrass you, but you merely retreated and left me. Ah, here we are. Please remove those golden gewgaws in your ears.'
The salaaming servant laid a crystal and silver box upon his master's knees. Anthony opened it and took out, wrapped in crimson cloth scrawled in gold mottoes, a pair of earrings, the jewelled fringes of which would hang down upon the wearer's breast. They were of a massive, savage beauty set with rubies and turquoises. The man caressed them lovingly. He knew that they were old enough and fine enough to have once hung in the ears of Scheherazade herself.
'Put them on, Miss Bardeen.'
'Oh, I couldn't. You see, the hooks are much too large for my ears. In civilized countries the ear is pierced only with a small needle. How could any one have worn them?'
She gathered them up and turned them towards the fire. Her face burned with a childish wonder and the light from the hearth glittered over her sleek, blue-black hair. Once again she created the illusion of ancient Persia. A demon stirred within Jones's chest. He bit his lower lip and smiled, partly at the idea that there was a civilized way of cutting holes in flesh for the suspension of baubles, partly in recognition of her brightening beauty.
'Nonsense!'
He pressed close to her. The thick perfume assaulted his nostrils. 'I'll...put them in for you.'
She struggled, cried out twice in agony. The pain was much greater than the original piercing. A drop of blood welled from each lobe and slid upon her neck. She sprang from him and, whirling about, faced him utterly bewildered, pressing her hands to her cruelly burdened ears.
'Why did you do that?' she cried out hotly, all the emotional turmoil of the evening suddenly trembling in her voice.
He stood away from her, his dark face almost angry.
'Now you will never forget me,' he promised.
'Why should I remember you?'
'Because there is a bond between us, Lanice. You feel it as strongly as I, but your training has been so damnable and, Heaven help you, you are such a lady, you will not recognize the fact.'
She turned her head away from him and her body drooped wearily. 'What bond?'
He said defiantly, 'What you would consider an "evil" bond.'
'You are evil.'
'As life itself.'
She began to cry, and this sign of weakness irritated him, who had been intoxicated when she had first turned upon him and asked 'Why did you do that?'
'Weep,' he said, unsympathetically, and kicked the fire with his red leather boot.
'I want to go home!' she cried. Her voice was anticlimactic. She gathered her draperies together, wrapping herself in a mist of copper gold and fragrance. The cruel, bloody earrings hung to her breast. They faced each other for a long moment, questioning the future.
'Come,' he said, 'let's part friends'—and bent his face towards her. She leaped back in maidenly terror, and, wordless, fled from the room. In the hall she found her mink pelisse which she did not stop to put on. The door slammed after her. She plunged through snow to her knees and flung herself into the waiting hack. The pain in her ears tormented her, and sobbing a little she managed to unhook the earrings. 'Why did you do that?' she cried over and over in her mind. Wave after wave of emotion raced over her, leaving her hot and cold. With closed eyes she could believe that Jones himself still sat beside her in the hack, that in a moment she would feel him against her. She wanted to cry 'Don't, don't!' to the spectre, for her fear of him was very real. Then she would shut her eyes again, and again feel painfully conscious of his devastating presence.
'Don't scold so, Ellen,' said my grandmother mildly as I very reluctantly commenced the mending of a pair of hose. 'What would Fred Graham say if he could see your dimples lost in such a cloud?...Lost in such a fog...lost in such...lost...' The words beneath the lady editoress's pen jumbled into Arabic. Abracadabra. What she wrote stared back at her. Anthony Jones, Sir Anthony, Lord Jones. Jones the Belted Earl. She glanced at the hundred painted plates from 'Hearth and Home' tacked upon her movable wall. Their perfect little faces mowed at her and they seemed to rustle their belling skirts. She pressed her hands to her ears. They no longer hurt her and she vaguely regretted their complete recovery. 'If I am in love with Anthony Jones,' she thought, 'why can't I feel the way ladies do in stories?' She inked her pen.
'I did not care what Fred Graham would think. I was an exception, truly! I had no doubt that every one of the girls was glad that it rained so that we could not go on the picnic only that they might stay at home to enjoy the exquisite felicity of darning old hose. Oh, of course! How delightful! And I began to cry.'
Miss Bigley wanted a good, stiff moral lesson. Something that would drive home economy. So Grandmamma in the story must tell an improving tale as 'I' darn and pout. 'You have often seen your cousin Mary, Edward's wife, and expressed your surprise that a man so handsome and so nobly gifted could marry a lady that was so unmistakably plain, one, too, that admired beauty so intensely as he did. Let me gratify your curiosity. Once upon a time, years ago, when he was much handsomer than now and a rising young lawyer, he loved Caroline Willoughby; she was extremely beautiful, accomplished, fascinating, and a great belle. He worshipped her with all the enthusiasm of his gifted nature. One summer evening they were riding down the shady road in silence. He had determined to tell her of his devotion, but could find no words. The horse shyed unexpectedly and she fell; he was at her side in an instant, pale with fright. He conveyed her to the nearest house and sent a servant for a physician. He came, and fearing that her limb was fractured, signed to a servant to remove her stocking. Off came the dainty little boot that Edward had held so tenderly as she mounted, and revealed a tattered stocking. The physician smiled, assured him that no bones were broken, and sent a carriage to convey them home. Neither spoke. Entering the house, he briefly explained to her mother the circumstances, expressed his regrets, and turned to leave; then suddenly pausing he added in a moment of hurry, "I had almost forgotten it...Miss Willoughby's stocking." And bowing, placed it on the table. The poor girl fainted and was sick for some time after. She really loved, and it was a great blow to her. She married old Goldthwaite, the millionaire.'
The story was coming just right. It sounded exactly like Miss Bigley. She wriggled her toes guiltily and found the small hole in her left stocking. Dear, dear, if Anthony knew she had deliberately put on a tattered hose, he would...no, he wouldn't. He'd hardly care. There couldn't be girls that looked like Persian miniatures in Cincinnati; why probably there was hardly a 'lady' in that frontier town. But Anthony had obviously thought the Scollay girls fascinating, they with their brisk, gold hair and sweet-pea faces, but in Cincinnati....Ah, the Park Street clock. Eleven. Miss Bigley wanted this story by noon. Well, here goes!
'As for Edward, this cold bath of his imagination cured his love. He avoided ladies' society and rapidly rose to eminence in his profession. It was six years after this when he met your cousin Mary. Her self-sacrificing care of her invalid mother, her warm heart and native sense interested him deeply; still, his former experience had made him distrustful. Accident decided him. Mary's former governess was living in very destitute circumstances in an obscure part of town. And one wet day she went to see her. The carriage not returning, she set out for home alone and met Edward. He offered his services and at a muddy crossing her light slipper was left in the mud. He stooped to fit it on; there was no one in sight and she timidly advanced a dainty foot with the cleanest of stockings and one of the neatest of little darns. He could resist no longer, and when he told me the story he showed me the identical hose.'
Now the thing's done. Except for an ending bringing 'me' and Fred Graham together over a basket of darning.
They didn't wear stockings in Arabia or stays or hoops or trousers, really. She gathered all her pencils together and, leaning almost at right angles over the waste-basket, began to sharpen them meticulously. Mr. Fox sauntered in, whistling, and as he drank from the Rockingham cooler he watched. Miss Bardeen's exactitude in the matter interested him. Not a sliver fell to the floor. Each point was perfection.
'Another story for "Hearth and Home"?' he asked, glancing at her desk.
'Yes.'
'What do you think of the stories we publish in that magazine?'
'Oh, some are very skilful. And I'm sure, as Miss Bigley says, they must do a world of good.'
'What ones have you enjoyed?'
She shot him a quick, birdlike glance. 'I liked "Mrs. Troubles' Twins" and "The Hands of Martha."'
'Did you like "This I Have Promised"?'
'But that was in your 'Journal.' Yes, it was stupendous.'
'The thing coagulates like life. Do you think "The Hands of Martha" is like life?'
'Why, yes.'
'If women are patient and self-sacrificing they find love, wealth, and happiness. They always do in your stories, you know. Do they in life?'
'I think,' she said with an abominable smugness, 'we usually get what we deserve in this world, no—not always.' She recalled Eliza Hornblower, a good, gentle creature blessed with all the virtues and cursed with a wretched complexion. In stories, when you call girls 'plain' you are never specific. If Eliza had been wicked, unchaste, would she have been more cruelly punished? Mamma was the happiest person she had ever known. She humbly asked the oracle, 'Shouldn't a story be better than life, in a way truer?'
'Should it?'
'Teach a lesson?'
'Shouldn't it? One has to work these things out for one's self. You haven't read or lived very widely yet.'
'Mr. Trelawney wants me to try Gautier and George Sand, but I've always heard the French masters are so sadly immoral.'
'Well, if you want always to write for "H. and H.," keep away from them. Keep on rolling sugar-coated moral lessons for ladies of delicate digestive tracts, intellectually speaking.'
The girl thought guiltily of the dreadful books she had read with furtive eagerness at the Athenæum, all about witchcraft. Of course, not even the wicked French could possibly be as bad as that, but then why tell all one knows? She went on sharpening pencils exquisitely, after Mr. Fox had gone. She thought of life and how unlike a story it was.
Life was a patchwork of all things. Things ugly and beautiful, sordid, pathetic, wonderful. You never could make things in stories as wonderful as in life because the stories were just the heads of flowers pulled off without any stems or leaves, and surely no hidden roots with black mud caking them. And no dead flowers withering into new seed or decaying noisomely. Just the pretty heads pulled off and arranged in geometric design. In a story you could never tell the truth of Mr. Matthews's lewd embrace, or the fact that it was intended for her mother, or that she had afterwards retired to her room and been actually sick, in the English sense of the word.
Nor could you put into the story that one terrible moment in Miss Bigley's house when Anthony Jones had held her and hurt her very much, and for some diabolical reason the whole little room had flamed up with emotion ruddier than the firelight on the walls, and she, at once degraded and magnified, fled the room.
In stories you never put in what you really think of men. How once on a country road you had let an ox-team boy fold a blanket on one of his team and seat you on it, nor how he held your hand in his big red mitten and pressed his forehead a minute against your thigh. (The scene returned vividly, the boy's sturdy face framed in his wool cap looked helmeted and Roman.) Men—so strange. Other men a long way off, men walking in the spring with reins about their necks following in the furrow a plough. Lumbermen in winter with upturned sheepskin collars, heavy figures wrapped in frozen breath. Sweating men in midsummer, hoeing corn, loading hay wains, men early in the morning crying 'Co' boss' to the cows. She did not think of Augustus or the other students. Only of the men she had never known. The bestial but eyeless bronze boxer in the stereoscope suddenly leaped out of the blackness at her. All his bulging muscles seen in perspective. And suddenly she thought of Anthony Jones and a warm tide rose somewhere within her, swept up and almost drowned her. Anthony was at once all the men whom she had ever seen walking far off calling to their beasts. If this is love, if this ghastly feeling of suffocation...Her sigh quavered and broke. She wanted to cry. But the story was not quite done, and there by the portiere was her friend, Sears Ripley. Why did he come in to see her so often? Of course he had to finish the arrangements with Mr. Fox for Anthony's great book, but he always stopped in her office and looked at her consideringly. Perhaps he had known that she would fall in love with Captain Jones, if that was really what she had done. She felt no shame in his presence. She could have told him all about the brief scene in Miss Bigley's parlor after the lecture. Suddenly she realized that if she ever wanted to she could even tell him how, long, long ago, Mr. Matthews of New York had mistaken her for her mother.