The Smart Set/Volume 51/Issue 3/They Went in Search of Love

by Cosmo Hamilton

 

THEY WENT IN SEARCH OF LOVE

By Cosmo Hamilton

I

He was utterly alone.

His slight figure, well built but for a tendency to stoop, had become very familiar to the good people of Mountfair. Always alone, always scrupulously well dressed, he made his daily appearance, if fine, with the regularity of clockwork. The coloured gardeners, who attempted to tease the ever-falling leaves from the grass round the pleasant houses, told the time by him. Children who tricycled themselves red in the face along the narrow white strip of asphalt, mother-near to their homes, grew accustomed to his quiet, smiling, wistful passing, and wondered a little. The barking dog, whose egotism found incessant vent in a wagging tongue when mere man had the temerity to walk near his house, began to eye this recurring figure with something almost like tolerance. The postmen, with their blobby bags, shot him nods, and in time one or two tabby cats elevated their tails when they saw him coming, and gave him the time of day in the wheedling language of their kind.

In the town of Mountfair—quite a town this, if you please, with its thirty thousand inhabitants—his rather ascetic, clean-cut profile and grey-besprinkled hair, his kindly, grey eyes into which a smile came often, and his sensitive, sympathetic mouth were often the subject of shop conversation. He had a ready and even eager “Good-morning” for the conductors of the rasping yellow trolley-cars which passed so often, packed like sardine tins at night and in the early morning; for the policemen who stood stolidly outside the brave, white municipal building with its fat pillars and pompous doorway, and round about the admirable station with its wide approach and steam-heated waiting-rooms, all duly tesselated; for the over-fat coloured lady in gamboge blouse who watched life from the shabby door of her paper-candy-shoe-shine store—hats ironed and cleaned; and for the proprietors of the many chemists' shops, among whom he carefully divided his patronage in the matter of pipe-mixture and tooth paste, eau-de-quinine, and shaving soap.

If you had asked the managers and waitresses, bell boys and telephone attendants of the Mountfair Hotel what they thought of Mr. Barton G. White, you would have received the same answer, “Fine; he gives no trouble.”

And that, after all, was a very splendid reputation to obtain after a year's residence in a place where the staff was frequently changed, and many little things were, in consequence, often none too smooth. But Barton White never complained; and if, which was seldom, irritability came upon him because the morning papers had not made their appearance, he took it with him along the road through the woods, to his favorite place perched high up above the town, and let the breeze blow it away.

He loved this quiet road. He liked to look at the great solid rock that bordered one side of it, the typical, inevitable rock which had, in a subtle sort of way, hardened and made determined those early pioneers who had started a great country and a great race. It interested him to watch the spittle from the higher ground trickle down the surface of it, leaving marks as though mammoth snails had crawled there.

His walk through the woods in the spring, when the young birches and ashes and oaks were in their first joyous green, filled him with exhilaration and gladness, and almost brought a song to his lips. And even in the late autumn, when almost all the leaves had fallen, and lay crinkled, dry, and yellow under his feet, he found a sort of satisfaction about them. The trees had done their appointed job well and fitly, as they would do it again in due course. He liked that. It was good.

Always on the edge of the Mount he would sit, hatless, on the flat of a rock, and look out over the wide stretch of land beneath. Peppered with small, verandahed houses with different-coloured roofs, intersected by patches of trees which turned to purple before they bared themselves to winter, with here and there a towering factory chimney forever stammering smoke, it ran on to crowded Newark and to the Hudson. And on clear days, when the mist had dried, the faint Brobdingnagian outline of the buildings of Manhattan grew against the sky, almost unearthly in their size.

At first, as a new man to the Mount, some twenty miles from New York, Burton White gazed at the faint outline of the wonderful, remorseless city, in which he had worked all his youth and some of his middle age, away with the eyes of the man who stops breathless and amazed to look back at some gigantic foe which he has overcome after a frightful struggle.

At first he sat up there alone and quiet and secure, smoking the good cigar that he had earned honestly and well, turned his eyes with a triumph and a sort of glee toward the monster city that had demanded twenty-five of the best years of his life in return for retirement, with enough money to keep him in comfort for the rest of it. Sometimes he waved his hat at those faint, huge buildings, and laughed to know that he had escaped with a whole skin and a healthy brain.

But when he realized that he was perilously near fifty, neither young enough to take part in the strenuous exercises of the rising generation nor old enough to care to sit on the hotel verandah with the veterans and take part in conversation about the past; when it became painfully obvious that he stood like a fish out of water in the excellent hotel in which he had taken up his quarters, having no home, with a wistful desire to enjoy a kind of imitation home life, he began to look back at the distant city, all of whose clashing sounds of vivid struggling never reached as far as his quiet, reposeful retreat, not with the triumph of the conqueror, but the regret of one who missed and needed the exhilaration of competition.

There, at any rate, he had had his place, and was known as a fairly successful man. He was a unit of some consideration, to whom his business friends stopped and spoke. But there, in Mountfair, perched up above the small, increasing town, among the woods and rocks, out of touch with life, out of reach of the great octopus arms of the city he knew so well, he was no one. He counted for nothing. He was an onlooker, observed casually only by coloured gardeners' and other men's children, trades-people, policemen, trolley conductors, dogs, and cats.

For twenty-five years he had enjoyed the comfort of home life, and had worked to provide his mother with much more than the mere necessities. When she died he retired to live on the interest of the money that he had saved, and had gone, unconsciously, in search of love. He wanted, once more, to be needed. He wanted, once more, and now more eagerly and poignantly, for some one person who should listen for his step and put her arms about his neck, to whom he could whisper “I love you, you are mine!”

II

And then Miss Eleanor Parker Stretton came to live at the Mountfair Hotel.

At first she slipped into the daily routine almost unnoticed, a quiet, shy woman about whose dress there were still the signs of mourning. She was given a small table in one of the corners of the large dining-room, whose big windows caught all the sun, and whose polished floor had paths of green carpet. And here, day after day, always alone, always with studious punctuality, she took her meals—breakfast after the business men had left grumpily for New York, luncheon when the large tables near the windows were surrounded by children, and those elsewhere by the elderly men and women just returned from a little walk in the grounds, if fine, or mild exercise, if wet, up and down the glassed-in verandah with its lure of bright yellow rocking-chairs and boxes of geraniums. In due time she was discussed and considered by the gossips in the place. That goes without saying. A past was duly manufactured for her in the usual way—a present and a future as well. It was gathered that she was in possession of fairly comfortable means, from the fact that she had a sitting as well as a bed room, and that she bought the latest novels from the bookstore in the town. Also because she had three dinner gowns and five day dresses, and because the chambermaid told the private maid of the lady with five daughters, who told everybody else as quickly as she could, that she had eight pairs of shoes. She was not homogeneous. She did not foregather in the hall or between meals. She walked alone and then retired to her rooms. Overtures were made for the purpose of finding out her story—she obviously possessed a story—but were quietly eluded. And when it was finally agreed that Miss Stretton “must have been very pretty once,” she was left alone.

And yet, like Barton White, Eleanor Parker Stretton, having no home, had gone to the Mountfair Hotel with a wistful desire to find something approaching home-life there. For she, too, was utterly alone. And she, too, with more than half her life behind her, needed to be needed, because she, too, had known the blessing of having been needed, and being needed no longer left a great gap in her life and a hollow place in her heart.

From the age of fifteen she had been housekeeper, companion, sun meter, optimist to her father, a hard-working doctor in Brooklyn. To him she had gladly, eagerly devoted all the best years of her life, and when he died she stood alone, quite utterly alone, in this big callous, busy world, to make a new life in new surroundings amid new faces, but always with the same old hollow in her heart. She was forty-three, and her hair was very grey in places, and her head was very full of dreams that had never come true. The little house, the devoted husband, the young, rushing children, where were they?

Instead, she had a nice income from the hardly won savings of her good and charitable father; she had her books that so often awoke her regrets; she had her cheery little sitting-room with its angular hotel furniture and telephone, and gurgling steam-heater, and three evening gowns, five day dresses, and eight pairs of shoes.

Life is, however, very just in the matter of compensation. Romance, just a little touch of romance, was provided to this romanceless woman by Providence, who now took a sudden, small interest in her.

From the moment that she saw Barton White standing aloof upon the steps of the verandah with the morning sun upon his clean-cut profile and loneliness stamped upon his broad forehead, a thrill, a new and curious thrill, seemed to electrify her heart and bring into the hitherto monotonously quiet, empty day a new interest. But not for all her little fortune could she bring herself to give even so much as a distant good-morning to the man who passed her table three times a day to go to his Own in a distant corner, who so frequently paced up and down the glassed-in verandah where she sometimes sat and pretended to read so that she might watch the children, and who many times stood bare-headed in the elevator when she was on her way up or down.

Sometimes she imagined that she caught his wistful eyes upon her, but always, she told herself, that he must be looking at the pretty anæmic girl in the broad waistband who sat just behind her. Sometimes she was almost certain that he came towards her intending to speak, but as he always passed in silence she was obliged to assure herself that she was wrong.

But she wasn't wrong. She was very far from being wrong. Barton White would have given a year of his life to have had the courage to make friends with this sister in loneliness, to have been able to give and to receive some of the sympathy without which men and women must go thirsty through life; to have been able to exchange ideas, share walks, read the same books and feel that there was one person, just one, who was glad at his approach and who would lay a flower on his grave when he was called.

But her shyness was contagious, and the touch of mourning that was on her face as well as in her clothes made him fearful in intruding; and so several weeks went by and neither spoke, and neither guessed that each, in the fastnesses of lonely rooms, rehearsed little formal openings and phrases in the matter of weather and the tone of leaves and the state of politics, and neither dreamed that each woke in the morning with a new sense of interest and expectation, and the same feeling of relief at meeting, although wordlessly, in the hall.

But Providence, now alert, did not intend to be put out by such proceedings. He put Miss Eleanor Stretton to bed one day with a slight attack of the influenza, and then, in all confidence, went upon his much required way. He had, as he knew, every reason to be confident. The moment Barton White heard that the doctor had been called in to attend to Miss Eleanor Stretton, he set off hurriedly to the town, bought a great bunch of flowers and a dozen magazines, returned by the trolley, was fortunate enough to meet the doctor on his way to his hard-worked car, and asked after the patient.

“Oh, nothing to worry about, sir. A touch of influenza. We'll soon have her up and around again.”

With what relief and thankfulness did this shy man, now lover, hurry upstairs to the invalid's floor to find the chambermaid.

“These flowers to Miss Stretton with my compliments and best wishes for a speedy recovery,” he said, and went.

Now it happened that the chambermaid was young and brisk, and that she had noticed these two lonely people. All her national sentiment and spirit of romance flamed up, and this was the message that she delivered to the feverish lady:

“Mr. Barton White sends ye this bouquet with his dear love, ma'am, and he hopes to heaven that ye'll very soon bring the beautiful face down-stairs again.”

III

And in this oddly comic-pathetic way these two strangers, who found the world as large and empty and unresponsive as the room in which a young child is shut up alone, came to be friends. The illness and the flowers, and more than both the sentimental, kindly Irish chambermaid, broke the ice. And daily all three of them widened the crack, because every day Barton White bought and sent in flowers, and every day the Irish girl altered and coloured the message.

Not since the awful hour that Death laid his hand on the shoulders of the over-tired man, who had waged a long war against him for other people's sake; had this woman been so happy. Illness was a blessing in disguise, and the scent of those daily gifts was filled with something that made her heart sing and her eyes bright and the world very beautiful. On the second day she wrote a short note of thanks to the man who had brought love into her life. It was a little formal, a little frightened, but it began cordially and ended very sincerely.

It took Barton White three hours to answer it, and at the end of that time he did not dare to read the closely written sheets to see what he had had the courage to say. There was nothing in them that called for timidity. He had merely told her all the news of the hotel as he had gathered it as a silent looker-on, and described, with a nice touch of humour, the effects of the turning leaves. Unconsciously he had slipped, here and there, into autobiography, and given her a brief peep into his kindly nature and starved sympathy. It was a quite charming effort

And that was the beginning of the daily letters that passed between these two, letters that warmed up gradually until Barton White wrote “I love you,” and Eleanor Stretton replied, “I love you.”

But when the doctor's car ceased to come honking round the drive, and it became known that Miss Stretton was well again, people asked themselves why it was that she remained in her rooms and had her meals sent up.

Barton White asked himself that question also. Only the Irish chambermaid knew the reason, and, placed upon her honor to say nothing, she held her tongue. It was an heroic effort, because never had she longed to tell the other servants anything so much as she longed to tell the strange things that were going on in Nos. 20 and 21.

But were they, under the circumstances, so very strange? Was it not very human, and therefore, perhaps, very foolish, for Miss Stretton to set herself eagerly to turn back the hands of the clock? Since the world began, men and women have endeavored to accomplish this impossible deed, and they will some time do so in one way or another so long as the old world wags. She was loved, and therefore she strove to do something to herself that would make her more attractive to the man who loved her.

Who could the two women be, then, who came up from the town to see her, carrying bags, other than the dressmaker and the hair-dresser? The one was required to render the three evening gowns and the five day frocks a little younger. The other came to “touch” Miss Stretton's greying hair—just to touch. The dresses were duly altered here and there. The primness was removed, the formality softened, and the hair, under the cunning fingers of the specialist, took on a warm red glow. Yes, red. The secret is out, the touch was the touch of henna!

And then another specialist arrived, a sort of clock repairer, too. This one set about putting back the hands with her own that were so soft and deft. She called it face massage, but it was something more than that, because a little blush was left on Miss Stretton's pale cheeks long after the woman had gone. The dressing table gleamed with dainty bottles of curious messes, one tiny round flat box of blush renewer, and a pencil. Yes, a pencil, which when applied with care to the eyebrows made them more arched, a little thicker.

And when, one afternoon, with the blinds discreetly placed, Miss Stretton stood in a frock that clung fashionably to her ankles, the excited Irish girl was asked, after several roundabout questions, “How old do you think I look now, Mary?” the answer came at once: “Sure, an' ye don't look wan day over twenty-sevin, ma'am—cross me heart and die if ye does.”

Whereupon a new daisy showed its face upon the Blarney Stone, and Miss Stretton nearly wept.

And what of Burton White during these days?

Here was a man all excited and eager, who had declared his love and been accepted. Here were hours and even days going by, and the woman in whose hands lay his future happiness, that whole new and splendid future that was no longer to be killed in isolation, remained upstairs, although the doctor had gone and health had returned.

“Give me ten days,” she had written, “ten days in which to regain all my strength and to think of all we mean to each other.”

And for the first two of them he waited with sympathetic impatience. Every day he sent her flowers, and every day a letter, sometimes two. And when he passed up the road that led to his favorite woods, he built metaphorically for her and himself the most charming compact houses on eligible sites, each one with a different coloured roof, and at night he stood at the window of his lonely bedroom and thought that all the myriad lights of Mountfair and Newark quivered very friendly congratulations, having come out especially to celebrate the good and glorious change in his way of life.

On the third day he caught himself eying his face in his looking-glass. What a pity that his hair was so grey. What a pity!

If—if he were to—suppose that he, like many of the business men he had known—

After all, grey hair was not necessary.

There were applications, juices, even dyes—he might as well be frank—he had seen them advertised in papers and magazines. Why look old when he now felt so young?

This sentence became a sort of motif in the music of the breeze. For one whole day he listened to it, and refused to hear it. What was the ultimate use of interfering with nature? Nevertheless, how good it would be to appear before her when she came down, she who loved. him, as he would have been if he had had the great good fortune to meet her ten years before!

The next morning he joined the business» men in the hotel in the motor-'bus, and adventured over a patch of unbelievable road on to the trolley track and down hill through the town to the station, and so once more into the great city where all his active years had been spent in work, to which he had dedicated his youth and manhood to the tender service of a mother's needs.

Once more he came to the active, splendid river, alive with great steam ferries carrying human toll to the market place, and the fleet of small, sturdy tugs spurting up water with their blunt noses in the determined discharge of their duty. Once more he looked at the funnels of the great liners that rested silently and briefly in dock, waiting to transfer men and mails to England, France, and Russia.

Once more he stood in the streets of New York, with their multitudinous noises, beneath buildings whose lofty ambition led them skyward.

There might still be that man in the barber's shop in the basement of the Astor Hotel who had so often cut his hair and aired his views as to the chances of the giants of Yale or Harvard in the national game. To the Astor he took a taxi. Hang expense; he was in love and he was loved! The two together spelled the nearest thing to heaven that man was permitted on earth. Yes, the man was there.

“Why, say,” he said, and held out a cordial hand; and when the word “dye” was whispered, he added, “Sure, right now. Will you take off your collar?”

That night Barton White returned to the Mountfair Hotel too late for dinner. He felt that his hair was almost too brown, and he remembered that the lights in the dining-room were somewhat piercing. Also the eyes. He dodged the bell-boy who worked the elevator, and hurried upstairs. A chambermaid was sitting in the passage at the top, reading The Evening Sun. He gave her good-evening and a little shock. He saw it in the sudden cavity of her mouth, and he knew as he put the key into the lock of his door that his dye would be all over the hotel before morning. The bottle that had weighed so heavily in his pocket, wrapped in the printed directions, was placed in a drawer, beneath a pile of underclothing.

Barton White was afraid to look at himself in the glass. The barber has said that he looked as good as thirty-one and a half. All the way back White had been puzzling to find out why he had not said either thirty-one or thirty-two. Was there anything in the nature of ribaldy in that “one and a half?” After all, health had a good deal to do with the shade of a man's hair, and he was well. Then, too, happiness was good for hair, and he was very happy. So why should he worry?

But for several days he went out for long walks, after telephoning to the town for Eleanor's flowers, and writing his letter to Eleanor, and he took his meals away from the hotel. A change of diet was notoriously good for the digestion. Poor, dear Barton White! How little he knew of the ways of all such places as these houses from home. His brown hair was already a stale joke!

And then, at last, the night came when he was able to say, “Tomorrow, tomorrow she comes.” She had written a little quivering note asking him to meet her at eleven o'clock in the covered-in verandah.

He was glad that it was to be eleven o'clock. The men would have gone out to the city, the women to their rooms or out to the town, and the children would be in the grounds under the chocolate eyes of coloured nursemaids.

Half-past ten found him pacing, pacing on the linoleum between the yellow rockng-chairs and the boxes of geraniums. The sun of the Indian summer shone down warmly upon the glass. A clear blue sky gleamed behind the remaining brown leaves of the trees outside, and laughter came from the servants' quarters in the left wing of the house.

He heard a step, and turned.

His heart was in his mouth, his hat in his hand.

The unforgiving light fell upon his hair.

A few paces from the doorway stood—

He drew up short as the lady with the red locks and pink cheeks and ankle-tight skirt stopped as though turned to stone.

For several moments these two, who had not been content to let well enough alone, and who had both tinkered with the hands of the clock, stood looking. Neither recognized the other. Neither saw in this person the one who was loved and needed. It was unspeakably pathetic. Finally, with dreaded nervousness, they moved simultaneously, gave each other a hurried “Good-morning!” and passed.

IV

Half an hour later Barton White was washing his head, feverishly, and up in her room, with the bitter tears of humiliation in her eyes, Eleanor Stretton was removing the blush from her cheeks. It was no use. Anno Domini had hit them as it did everyone else, and had hit them very hard. “Good-morning!” Think of it! All that preparation and expense for a mutual “Good-morning!” All those priceless days wasted, their one touch of romance killed because of over-anxiety.

For the next few days both Barton White and Eleanor Stretton kept to their rooms. The one had severe indigestion, the other a slight recurrence of her complaint. The weather was so treacherous. But no flowers went up to No. 21, and no letters to No. 33. What went on in those rooms during these awful days no one knows. But in both grey gradually came back into two heads of hair, and with it a return to sense.

It was afternoon, with the sun setting all red behind the yellow leaves, when they came face to face again, the same dear, elderly people that they had been before their wistful adventure backwards into a never-to-be-recovered youth. His hair was nearly white as he stood hatless before her, and her cheeks a little too pale as she met his eyes.

“My dear!” he said.

“Oh, my dear!” she answered.

“I did it for you,” he said.

“And I for you,” she answered.

“But I loved you as you were and are,” he said.

“And I as I see you now,” she answered.

“Thank God, you've come back!” he said.

“Thank God for you!” she answered.

And as he put his arms about her shoulders and his lips upon her cheeks there was a little sound as though someone were creeping away on tiptoe through the dead leaves. It might have been Providence.