Different Girls by Various

V >> Various >> Different Girls

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13

"Not soon enough to benefit you and me."

"Probably not."

"Then why waste your talents on the college, when the best years of your
life are still before you?"

"I am not teaching for money, Gertrude." He hated putting into the bald
phrase his consecration to his ideals for the young men of his State; he
hated putting it into words at all; but something in his voice told her
that the argument was finished.

There was a sound of carriage wheels on the drive. He arose and began to
assist her with her wraps. "It is too bad for you to be dependent on
even such nice escorts as the Dillinghams are," he solaced, recovering
himself. "We college folk are a sorry lot."

But when she was gone, the mood for composition which an hour before had
seemed so near had escaped him, and he put away his books and
manuscript, standing for a while, a little chilled in mind and body,
before the grate and looking at the photograph on the mantel. While he
did so the haunting likeness he had seen grew more distinct and by
degrees another face overspread that of his young daughter, the face of
the sister he had loved and lost.

With a sudden impulse he crossed the room to an old-fashioned mahogany
secretary, opened its slanting lid, and unlocking with some difficulty a
small inner drawer, returned with it to his desk. Several packages of
letters tied with faded ribbon filled the small receptacle, but they
struck upon him with the strangeness of something utterly forgotten. The
pieces of ribbon had once held for him each its own association of time
or place; now he could only remember, looking down upon them with tender
gaze, that they had been Stella's, worn in her hair, or at her throat or
waist. Simple and inexpensive he saw they were. Arnoldina would not have
looked at them.

Overcoming something of reluctance, he took one of the packages from its
place. It contained the letters he had found in her writing-table after
her death, most of them written after she had come to Vaucluse by her
stepmother and the friends she had left in the village. He knew there
was nothing in any of them she would have withheld from him; in reading
them he was merely taking back something from the vanished years which,
if not looked at now, would perish utterly from earth. How affecting
they were--these utterances of true and humble hearts, written to one
equally true and good! His youth and hers in the remote country village
rose before him; not now, as once, pinched and narrow, but as salutary,
even gracious. He could but feel how changed his standards had become
since then, how different his measure of the great and the small of
life.

Suddenly, as he was thus borne back into the past, the old sorrow sprang
upon him, and he bowed before it. The old bitter cry which he had been
able to utter to no human consoler swept once more to his lips: "Oh,
Stella, Stella, you died before I really knew you; your brother, who
should have known and loved you best! And now it is too late, too
late."

He sent out as of old his voiceless call to one afar off, in some land
where her whiteness, her budding soul, had found their rightful place;
but even as he did so, his thought of her seemed to be growing clearer.
From that far, reverenced, but unimagined sphere she was coming back to
the range of his apprehension, to comradeship in the life which they
once had shared together.

He trembled with the hope of a fuller attainment, lifting his bowed head
and taking another package of the letters from their place. Her letters!
He had begged them of her friends in his desperate sense of ignorance,
his longing to make good something of all that he had lost in those last
two years of her life. What an innocent life it was that was spread
before him; and how young,--oh, how young! And it was a happy life. He
was astonished, after all his self-reproach, to realize how happy; to
find himself smiling with her in some girlish drollery such as used to
come so readily to her lips. He could detect, too, how the note of
gladness, how her whole life, indeed, had grown richer in the larger
existence of Vaucluse. At last he could be comforted that, however it
had ended, it was he who had made it hers.

He had been feeding eagerly, too eagerly, and under the pressure of
emotion was constrained to rise and walk the floor, sinking at last into
his armchair and gazing with unseeing eyes upon the ruddy coals in the
grate. That lovely life, which he had thought could never in its
completeness be his, was rebuilt before his vision from the materials
which she herself had left. What he had believed to be loss, bitter,
unspeakable even to himself, had in these few hours of the night become
wealth.

His quickened thought moved on from plane to plane. He scanned the
present conditions of his life, and saw with clarified vision how good
they were. What it was given him to do for his students, at least what
he was trying to do for them; the preciousness of their regard; the long
friendship with his colleagues; the associations with the little
community in which his lot was cast, limited in some directions as they
might be; the fair demesne of Greek literature in which his feet were so
much at home; his own literary gift, even if a slender one; his dear,
dear child.

And Gertrude? Under the invigoration of his mood a situation which had
long seemed unamenable to change resolved itself into new and simpler
proportions. The worthier aspects of his home life, the finer traits of
his wife's character, stood before him as proofs of what might yet be.
His memory had kept no record of the fact that when in the first year of
his youthful sorrow, sick for comfort and believing her all tenderness,
he had married her, to find her impatient of his grief, nor of the many
times since when she had appeared almost wilfully blind to his ideals
and purposes. His judgment held only this, that she had never understood
him. For this he had seldom blamed her; but to-night he blamed himself.
Instead of shrinking away sensitively, keeping the vital part of his
life to himself and making what he could of it alone, he should have set
himself steadily to create a place for it in her understanding and
sympathy. Was not a perfect married love worth the minor sacrifices as
well as the supreme surrender from which he believed that neither of
them would have shrunk?

He returned to his desk and began to rearrange the contents of the
little drawer. Among them was a small sandalwood box which had been
their mother's, and which Stella had prized with special fondness. He
had never opened it since her death, but as he lifted it now the frail
clasp gave way, the lid fell back, and the contents slipped upon the
desk. They were few: a ring, a thin gold locket containing the
miniatures of their father and mother, a small tintype of himself taken
when he first left home, and two or three notes addressed in a
handwriting which he recognized as Wayland's. He replaced them with
reverent touch, turning away even in thought from what he had never
meant to see.

By and by he heard in the distance the roll of carriages returning from
the Fieldings' reception. He replenished the fire generously, found a
long cloak in the closet at the end of the hall, and waited the sound of
wheels before his own door. "The rain has grown heavier," he said,
drawing the cloak around his wife as she descended from the carriage.
Something in his manner seemed to envelop her. He brought her into the
study and seated her before the fire. She had expected to find the house
silent; the glow and warmth of the room were grateful after the chill
and darkness outside, her husband's presence after that vague sense of
futility which the evening's gayety had left upon her.

"I suppose I ought to tell you about the party," she said, a little
wearily; "but if you don't mind, I will wait till breakfast. Everybody
was there, of course, and it was all very fine, as we all knew it would
be. I hope you've enjoyed your Latin poets more."

"They are Greek, dear," he said. "I have been making translations from
some of them now and then. Some day we will take a day off and then I'll
read them to you. But neither the party nor the poets to-night. See, it
is almost two o'clock."

"I knew it must be late. But you look as fresh as a child that has just
waked from sleep."

"Perhaps I have just waked."

They rose to go up-stairs. "I will go in front and make a light in our
room while you turn off the gas in the hall."

He paused for a moment after she had gone out and turned to a page in
the Greek Anthology for a single stanza. Shelley's translation was
written in pencil beside it:

Thou wert the morning star among the living,
Ere thy fair light had fled;
Now, having died, thou art as Hesperus giving
New splendor to the dead.

The Perfect Year

BY ELEANOR A. HALLOWELL

When Dolly Leonard died, on the night of my _debutante_ party, our
little community was aghast. If I live to be a thousand, I shall never
outgrow the paralyzing shock of that disaster. I think that the girls in
our younger set never fully recovered from it.

It was six o'clock when we got the news. Things had been jolly and
bustling all the afternoon. The house was filled with florists and
caterers, and I had gone to my room to escape the final responsibilities
of the occasion. There were seven of us girl chums dressing in my room,
and we were lolling round in various stages of lace and ruffles when the
door-bell rang. Partly out of consideration for the tired servants, and
partly out of nervous curiosity incited by the day's influx of presents
and bouquets, I slipped into my pink eider-down wrapper and ran down to
the door. The hall was startlingly sweet with roses. Indeed, the whole
house was a perfect bower of leaf and blossom, and I suppose I did look
elfish as I ran, for a gruff old workman peered up at me and smiled, and
muttered something about "pinky-posy"--and I know it did not seem
impertinent to me at the time.

At the door, in the chill blast of the night, stood our little old gray
postman with some letters in his hand. "Oh!" I said, disappointed, "just
letters."

The postman looked at me a trifle queerly--I thought it was my pink
wrapper,--and he said, "Don't worry about 'just letters'; Dolly Leonard
is dead!"

"Dead?" I gasped. "Dead?" and I remember how I reeled back against the
open door and stared out with horror-stricken eyes across the common to
Dolly Leonard's house, where every window was blazing with calamity.

"Dead?" I gasped again. "Dead? What happened?"

The postman eyed me with quizzical fatherliness. "Ask your mother," he
answered, reluctantly, and I turned and groped my way leaden-footed up
the stairs, muttering, "Oh, mother, mother, I don't _need_ to ask you."

When I got back to my room at last through a tortuous maze of gaping
workmen and sickening flowers, three startled girls jumped up to catch
me as I staggered across the threshold. I did not faint, I did not cry
out. I just sat huddled on the floor rocking myself to and fro, and
mumbling, as through a mouthful of sawdust: "Dolly Leonard is dead.
Dolly Leonard is dead. Dolly Leonard is dead."

I will not attempt to describe too fully the scene that followed. There
were seven of us, you know, and we were only eighteen, and no young
person of our acquaintance had ever died before. Indeed, only one aged
death had ever disturbed our personal life history, and even that remote
catastrophe had sent us scampering to each other's beds a whole winter
long, for the individual fear of "seeing things at night."

"Dolly Leonard is dead." I can feel myself yet in that huddled news-heap
on the floor. A girl at the mirror dropped her hand-glass with a
shivering crash. Some one on the sofa screamed. The only one of us who
was dressed began automatically to unfasten her lace collar and strip
off her silken gown, and I can hear yet the soft lush sound of a folded
sash, and the strident click of the little French stays that pressed too
close on a heaving breast.

Then some one threw wood on the fire with a great bang, and then more
wood and more wood, and we crowded round the hearth and scorched our
faces and hands, but we could not get warm enough.

Dolly Leonard was not even in our set. She was an older girl by several
years. But she was the belle of the village. Dolly Leonard's gowns,
Dolly Leonard's parties, Dolly Leonard's lovers, were the envy of all
womankind. And Dolly Leonard's courtship and marriage were to us the
fitting culmination of her wonderful career. She was our ideal of
everything that a girl should be. She was good, she was beautiful, she
was irresistibly fascinating. She was, in fact, everything that we
girlishly longed to be in the revel of a ballroom or the white sanctity
of a church.

And now she, the bright, the joyous, the warm, was colder than we were,
and _would never be warm again_. Never again ... And there were garish
flowers down-stairs, and music and favors and ices--nasty shivery
ices,--and pretty soon a brawling crowd of people would come and
_dance_ because I was eighteen--and still alive.

Into our hideous brooding broke a husky little voice that had not yet
spoken:

"Dolly Leonard told my big sister a month ago that she wasn't a bit
frightened,--that she had had one perfect year, and a perfect year was
well worth dying for--if one had to. Of course she hoped she wouldn't
die, but if she did, it was a wonderful thing to die happy. Dolly was
queer about it; I heard my big sister telling mother. Dolly said, 'Life
couldn't always be at high tide--there was only one high tide in any
one's life, and she thought it was beautiful to go in the full flush
before the tide turned.'"

The speaker ended with a harsh sob.

Then suddenly into our awed silence broke my mother in full evening
dress. She was a very handsome mother.

As she looked down on our huddled group there were tears in her eyes,
but there was no shock. I noticed distinctly that there was no shock.
"Why, girls," she exclaimed, with a certain terse brightness, "aren't
you dressed yet? It's eight o'clock and people are beginning to arrive."
She seemed so frivolous to me. I remember that I felt a little ashamed
of her.

"We don't want any party," I answered, glumly. "The girls are going
home."

"Nonsense!" said my mother, catching me by the hand and pulling me
almost roughly to my feet. "Go quickly and call one of the maids to come
and help you dress. Angeline, I'll do your hair. Bertha, where are your
shoes? Gertrude, that's a beautiful gown--just your color. Hurry into
it. There goes the bell. Hark! the orchestra is beginning."

And so, with a word here, a touch there, a searching look everywhere,
mother marshalled us into line. I had never heard her voice raised
before.

The color came back to our cheeks, the light to our eyes. We bubbled
over with spirits--nervous spirits, to be sure, but none the less
vivacious ones.

When the last hook was fastened, the last glove buttoned, the last curl
fluffed into place, mother stood for an instant tapping her foot on the
floor. She looked like a little general.

"Girls," she said, "there are five hundred people coming to-night from
all over the State, and fully two-thirds of them never heard of Dolly
Leonard. We must never spoil other people's pleasures by flaunting our
own personal griefs. I expect my daughter to conduct herself this
evening with perfect cheerfulness and grace. She owes it to her guests;
and"--mother's chin went high up in the air--"I refuse to receive in my
house again any one of you girls who mars my daughter's _debutante_
party by tears or hysterics. You may go now."

We went, silently berating the brutal harshness of grown people. We
went, airily, flutteringly, luminously, like a bunch of butterflies. At
the head of the stairs the music caught us up in a maelstrom of
excitement and whirled us down into the throng of pleasure. And when we
reached the drawing-room and found mother we felt as though we were
walking on air. We thought it was self-control. We were not old enough
to know it was mostly "youth."

My _debutante_ party was the gayest party ever given in our town. We
seven girls were like sprites gone mad. We were like fairy torches that
kindled the whole throng. We flitted among the palms like
will-o'-the-wisps. We danced the toes out of our satin slippers. We led
our old boy-friends a wild chase of young love and laughter, and
because our hearts were like frozen lead within us we sought, as it
were, "to warm both hands at the fires of life." We trifled with older
men. We flirted, as it were, with our fathers.

My _debutante_ party turned out a revel. I have often wondered if my
mother was frightened. I don't know what went on in the other girls'
brains, but mine were seared with the old-world recklessness--"Eat,
drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die." _We_ die!

I had a lover--a boy lover. His name was Gordon. He was twenty-one years
old, and he had courted me with boyish seriousness for three years.
Mother had always pooh-poohed his love-story and said: "Wait, wait. Why,
my daughter isn't even _out_ yet. Wait till she's out."

And Gordon had narrowed his near-sighted eyes ominously and shut his
lips tight. "Very well," he had answered, "I will wait till she is
out--but no longer."

He was rich, he was handsome, he was well-born, he was strong, but more
than all that he held my fancy with a certain thrilling tenacity that
frightened me while it lured me. And I had always looked forward to my
_debutante_ party on my eighteenth birthday with the tingling
realization, half joy, half fear, that on that day I should have to
settle once and forever with--_man_.

I had often wondered how Gordon would propose. He was a proud,
high-strung boy. If he was humble, and pleaded and pleaded with the hurt
look in his eyes that I knew so well, I thought I would accept him; and
if we could get to mother in the crowd, perhaps we could announce the
engagement at supper-time. It seemed to me that it would be a very
wonderful thing to be engaged on one's eighteenth birthday. So many
girls were not engaged till nineteen or even twenty. But if he was
masterful and high-stepping, as he knew so well how to be, I had decided
to refuse him scornfully with a toss of my head and a laugh. I could
break his heart with the sort of laugh I had practised before my mirror.

It is a terrible thing to have a long-anticipated event finally overtake
you. It is the most terrible thing of all to have to settle once and
forever with _man_.

Gordon came for me at eleven o'clock. I was flirting airily at the time
with our village Beau Brummel, who was old enough to be my grandfather.

Gordon slipped my little hand through his arm and carried me off to a
lonely place in the conservatory. For a second it seemed a beautiful
relief to be out of the noise and the glare--and alone with Gordon. But
instantly my realization of the potential moment rushed over me like a
flood, and I began to tremble violently. All the nervous strain of the
evening reacted suddenly on me.

"What's the matter with you to-night?" asked Gordon, a little sternly.
"What makes you so wild?" he persisted, with a grim little attempt at a
laugh.

At his words, my heart seemed to turn over within me and settle heavily.
It was before the days when we discussed life's tragedies with our best
men friends. Indeed, it was so long before that I sickened and grew
faint at the very thought of the sorrowful knowledge which I kept secret
from him.

Again he repeated, "What's the matter with you?" but I could find no
answer. I just sat shivering, with my lace scarf drawn close across my
bare shoulders.

Gordon took hold of a white ruffle on my gown and began to fidget with
it. I could see the fine thoughts go flitting through his eyes, but when
he spoke again it was quite commonplacely.

"Will you do me a favor?" he asked. "Will you do me the favor of
marrying me?" And he laughed. Good God! he _laughed_!

"A favor" to marry him! And he asked it as he might have asked for a
posie or a dance. So flippantly--with a laugh. "_A favor!_" And Dolly
Leonard lay dead of _her_ favor!

I jumped to my feet--I was half mad with fear and sex and sorrow and
excitement. Something in my brain snapped. And I struck Gordon--struck
him across the face with my open hand. And he turned as white as the
dead Dolly Leonard, and went away--oh, very far away.

Then I ran back alone to the hall and stumbled into my father's arms.

"Are you having a good time?" asked my father, pointing playfully at my
blazing cheeks.

I went to my answer like an arrow to its mark. "I am having the most
wonderful time in the world," I cried; "_I have settled with man_."

My father put back his head and shouted. He thought it was a fine joke.
He laughed about it long after my party was over. He thought my head was
turned. He laughed about it long after other people had stopped
wondering why Gordon went away.

I never told any one why Gordon went away. I might under certain
circumstances have told a girl, but it was not the sort of thing one
could have told one's mother. This is the first time I have ever told
the story of Dolly Leonard's death and my _debutante_ party.

Dolly Leonard left a little son behind her--a joyous, rollicking little
son. His name is Paul Yardley. We girls were pleased with the
initials--P.Y. They stand to us for "Perfect Year."

Dolly Leonard's husband has married again, and his wife has borne him
safely three daughters and a son. Each one of my six girl chums is the
mother of a family. Now and again in my experience some woman has
shirked a duty. But I have never yet met a woman who dared to shirk a
happiness. Duties repeat themselves. There is no duplicate of happiness.

I am fifty-eight years old. I have never married. I do not say whether I
am glad or sorry. I only know that I have never had a Perfect Year. I
only know that I have never been warm since the night that Dolly Leonard
died.

Editha

BY WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS

The air was thick with the war I feeling, like the electricity of a
storm which has not yet burst. Editha sat looking out into the hot
spring afternoon, with her lips parted, and panting with the intensity
of the question whether she could let him go. She had decided that she
could not let him stay, when she saw him at the end of the still
leafless avenue, making slowly up toward the house, with his head down,
and his figure relaxed. She ran impatiently out on the veranda, to the
edge of the steps, and imperatively demanded greater haste of him with
her will before she called aloud to him, "George!"

He had quickened his pace in mystical response to her mystical urgence,
before he could have heard her; now he looked up and answered, "Well?"

"Oh, how united we are!" she exulted, and then she swooped down the
steps to him. "What is it?" she cried.

"It's war," he said, and he pulled her up to him, and kissed her.

She kissed him back intensely, but irrelevantly, as to their passion,
and uttered from deep in her throat, "How glorious!"

"It's war," he repeated, without consenting to her sense of it; and she
did not know just what to think at first. She never knew what to think
of him; that made his mystery, his charm. All through their courtship,
which was contemporaneous with the growth of the war feeling, she had
been puzzled by his want of seriousness about it. He seemed to despise
it even more than he abhorred it. She could have understood his
abhorring any sort of bloodshed; that would have been a survival of his
old life when he thought he would be a minister, and before he changed
and took up the law. But making light of a cause so high and noble
seemed to show a want of earnestness at the core of his being. Not but
that she felt herself able to cope with a congenital defect of that
sort, and make his love for her save him from himself. Now perhaps the
miracle was already wrought in him, In the presence of the tremendous
fact that he announced, all triviality seemed to have gone out of him;
she began to feel that. He sank down on the top step, and wiped his
forehead with his handkerchief, while she poured out upon him her
question of the origin and authenticity of his news.

All the while, in her duplex emotioning, she was aware that now at the
very beginning she must put a guard upon herself against urging him, by
any word or act, to take the part that her whole soul willed him to
take, for the completion of her ideal of him. He was very nearly perfect
as he was, and he must be allowed to perfect himself. But he was
peculiar, and he might very well be reasoned out of his peculiarity.
Before her reasoning went her emotioning: her nature pulling upon his
nature, her womanhood upon his manhood, without her knowing the means
she was using to the end she was willing. She had always supposed that
the man who won her would have done something to win her; she did not
know what, but something. George Gearson had simply asked her for her
love, on the way home from a concert, and she gave her love to him,
without, as it were, thinking. But now, it flashed upon her, if he could
do something worthy to _have_ won her--be a hero, _her_ hero--it would
be even better than if he had done it before asking her; it would be
grander. Besides, she had believed in the war from the beginning.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13