What Will People Say? A Novel 26 – Hughes · Verses Across
Literature · Romance
What Will People Say? A Novel 26Chapter 26
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Literature · Romance
What Will People Say? A Novel 26
Chapter 26
HughesEnglish
All the way back to the hotel, all the while he was selecting what clothes he should take, all the while he waited for the hour of the general rendezvous to arrive Forbes was troubled by the remembrance of Willie Enslee's appearance at Persis' home.
He had apparently come in hot pursuit. On the other hand, he might have come merely to make the final arrangements for the excursion to the country. And yet Willie must be accepted as a rival. Or, rather, it was Forbes that was the rival, since Enslee's infatuation for Persis was generally known long before Forbes reached New York.
Forbes did not approve of men who went after other men's sweethearts to take them away. But Persis had told him that she had never loved any man; ergo, she had not loved Enslee--if Enslee could be called a man.
Even so, Forbes would have preferred to make love to Mr. Enslee's sweetheart somewhere else than at Mr. Enslee's home. But how was he to fight his rival except where his rival was? How rescue the imprisoned princess but by invading the ogre's castle? Physically, Enslee was hardly more than a pocket ogre, but his wealth made him a giant. It was with the Enslee Estates that Forbes must grapple. He feared that Persis might drift into their wizard power, and he wanted to save her from that life of "luxurious misery" of which he had read so much, for that life of "blissful poverty with love" of which he had read so much.
Besides, in invading Enslee's own domain he was giving Enslee every advantage. All of the splendor of Enslee's chateau, the armor of riches and the sword of gold, would defend him, while Forbes would attack only with his empty hands and the power of love. If Goliath thought that David took an unfair advantage of him, why did not Goliath lay aside his buckler and his bludgeon and use a sling, too? Pebbles were plentiful enough.
Forbes reasoned at his scruples till they faced the other way. He argued till what he would have called vicious in other men became sincerely virtuous in his own special instance. So men and empires, republics and religions have always argued when they were about to try to take something away from somebody.
As Forbes folded his togs and wished them better and braver, he paused to laugh at what Persis had told him: Willie believed that Forbes was flirting with Mrs. Neff for herself or her daughter! What a blind little ape Enslee was! Then Forbes straightened up and flushed and called himself a double-dyed cad. He flung aside the things he was folding and resolved not to go to Enslee's home at all.
He sank into a chair and pondered. If he did not go he would be left alone in New York. Only a few days remained of his little vacation. By the time Persis came back Forbes would be at his army post, a slave of discipline and the everlasting round of the same dull duties. Persis would be angry and hurt, and she would marry Enslee; she would live in that home with Enslee; she would become part of the Enslee Estates, body and soul.
Forbes' gorge rose at the visions this brought to his mind. He ripped out an oath, and flung off the withes of such false honor. He would, he must, save Persis at any cost. If Enslee were foolish enough to think that Forbes was hunting Mrs. Neff or Alice, let him take the consequences. If Enslee had not thought so, he would not have asked Forbes to come along. To take advantage of an enemy's weaknesses was the first rule of warfare. To shoot from cover was the first business of a marksman.
This was not a contest in sharp-shooting at targets under strict rules, with a medal for a prize. This was a battle in rough country for the rescue of a beautiful girl.
Forbes granted himself a plenary indulgence, and resumed packing, smiling again at Willie's idea that he was a suitor for the post of third husband to Mrs. Neff.
He did not smile so well a few hours later, when Willie, with the kindliest of motives, assigned him to Mrs. Neff's automobile.
"You two sweethearts," Enslee said, with a matchmaker's grin, "will want to ride together, of course. Persis and I will keep out of your way as much as we can."
Forbes was sportsman enough to credit Willie with a bull's-eye. He smothered his chagrin and helped Mrs. Neff into her car, while his two suit-cases were strapped in the trunk-rack with the family baggage.
The motor-caravan was made up of three machines. Winifred ran her own roadster, nursing the steering-wheel to her bosom, while her fat elbows harried Ten Eyck's cramped form. Bob Fielding had been unable to get away from the troubled waters of Wall Street, and Winifred had adopted Ten Eyck as his understudy.
Mrs. Neff took her four-passenger touring-car. Forbes decided after several appalling bumps that it had belonged to her first husband. Alice sat with the chauffeur, dreaming of Stowe Webb, no doubt. In the rear Mrs. Neff, in her most garrulous mood, talked nonsense through a veil whose flying ends kept snapping in Forbes' face. And when they were beyond Broadway her cigarette ashes kept sifting into his eyes.
He was as polite as possible, but his thoughts were trying to pierce the dust-wake of the great six-cylinder touring-car in which Willie Enslee led the way with Persis. All Forbes could see of her was the top of her motor-hood and the veil that fled back like a signal beseeching him to make haste and save her.
Broadway in the late afternoon was thick with the home-going armies, and it seemed to stretch as long and as crowded as the Milky Way. On through Yonkers to Dobbs Ferry and Tarrytown the journey took them, passing an occasional monument of our brief history, a tablet to mark where Rochambeau met Washington and brought France to our rescue, or a memorial to the cowboys that arrested Major Andre.
In Forbes' then humor no small charms of nature or legend could have caught his mind from his jealousy. Even the epic levels of the Hudson River and the Valhalla walls of the Palisades hardly impressed him. What success they had with him was mainly due to his remembrance of seeing them first from the train that brought him to New York a few days, or a few eons, ago. He was full then of ambitions to shine as a soldier in an enlarged camp. Now his treasons and stratagems were concerned with a love-campaign whose spoils was Persis Cabot.
There was a pause by agreement for dinner at a road-house--"their last civilized meal," as Ten Eyck mournfully prophesied, "before they entered the Purgatory of Winifred's cooking at Willie's boarding-house."
When the task of fretting out a dinner was finished they got under way, pushing north again.
Eventually the pilot-car, or, rather, its guiding cloud of dust, swept off to the east, turning its back on the Hudson and plunging into the heart of Westchester County, an ocean of hills like green billows, and valleys like their troughs; peaceful castles set on high places, and pleasant villages dispersed in low; the homely roominess of farms, and now and then a huddle of crowded rookeries, where Italian peasants had set up a congenial little slums along some ugly waste.
Everything took on a wistfulness in the evening air, which the sunset was tincturing like claret poured into water. Forbes was aching to be with Persis, and he hoped that she was wistful to be with him. The moon had loitered with torch half aglow in the wings of the sky until the sun was gone, and then its lamp was raised, and it entered its own scene. In the houses lights began to pink the dark with the trite but irresistible appeal of Christmas-card transparencies.
Forbes lost all sense of direction in the winding roads, and even Mrs. Neff's chatter yielded to the brow-caressing dusk. The swift progress of the car gave no suggestion of wheels, but rather of a flying keel on a smooth stream.
Finally the searchlights of Enslee's machine turned sharp at right angles. A beautiful granite bridge leaped into view as suddenly as if the great god Wotan had builded it with a word. At the farther side of the bridge stood a lodge-keeper's home, whose architecture seemed to shift the scene instantly to the France of the first Francis.
"Here we are!" Mrs. Neff cried. "And I'm half frozen. I hope the gardener has aired the rooms and put dry sheets on the beds, or I'm in for lumbago."
"Mother, you're just death to romance!" Alice protested. She had doubtless been thinking of Stowe Webb.
The car glided across the bridge, and the moon-whipped stream reveling below it, then preceded through a granite gateway with a portcullis suspended like a social guillotine. And then the sense of privacy began. The very moon seemed to become a part of the Enslee Estates.
The motors tilted backward as the hill rose; and Mrs. Neff's rheumatic car groaned and worried a spiraling road up and up through masses of anonymous shrubs pouring forth incense, through spaces of moon-swept hillside and thickets of somber velours. Then there was a glimpse of the radiant geometry of moon-washed roofs. A turn or two more, and the wheels were swishing into the graveled court of a stately mansion.
The door under the porte-cochere was open, and in its embrasure stood a leanish man and his fattish wife, hospitable as innkeepers, the warm light streaming back of them like peering children.
Enslee's voice came out of the silence:
"That you, Prout? H'are you, Martha?" And then, with characteristic originality, "Well, we got here."
To which Prout responded with equal importance:
"So you did, sir."
He and his wife had been working like mad since Enslee telephoned, trying to turn themselves into a troop of servants, whisking shrouds from table and piano and chairs, and mopping a cloth of dust from every surface. They were as respectful now as Philemon and Baucis welcoming Jupiter, and as apologetic as if the palace were their own unworthy cot.
"I've got a pack of Indians with me, Prout," said Enslee. "I didn't want 'em, but they would come, and now we've got to make the best of it. Don't let 'em trample your flower-beds. And if anybody breaks a flower-stem we'll have him or her shot at sunrise."
Martha giggled into her fat palm.
"Oh, 'e will 'ave 'is joke; 'e will so. And isn't this Miss Cabot? Of course it is."
Forbes, seated in the rear car, heard again that assumption of Persis and Enslee as a couple.
The cars rolled up to the door in turn. The women as they got out piled their wraps on Martha till she completely disappeared, except for a pair of clutching hands, and a voice from the depths.
The chauffeurs made off down the road to the distant garage, with instructions to stay there after one of them should have come back for Winifred's roadster.
The gardener, apologizing for his awkwardness in the office of a butler, led the little troop into the great living-room, where a big fire blazed, splashing walls and floors with banners of red and yellow.
Prout explained that he had been unable to start either the hot-water furnace that heated the house or the dynamo that lighted it. And, being short-handed like, and took with a stroke of sciatiky from the onseasonable cold of the backward spring, he had found time to make fires only in the master's room, his mother's room, and one other. The caretaker, who had kept a fire going all winter for the sake of the water-pipes, had let it go out at the first warm weather and gone for a visit to his wife's mother.
"That's what we get for coming up before the place has been set to rights," Willie grumbled. "I suppose you girls will have to draw lots for my room."
"Me for the nursery," said Winifred. "It's the sunniest place in the house, and--"
"You're not going to try to sleep on one of those children's beds?" Willie gasped.
"No, nor on two of them," said Winifred; "but there's a glorious window-seat a mile wide."
Willie's self-sacrifice was of the parsimonious sort that made acceptance impossible. None of the women would deprive him of his bed. Mrs. Neff was assigned to Willie's mother's room, and Alice and Persis to those on either side. Forbes and Ten Eyck were exiled to the southwest wing.
Prout and Martha could not believe that Mr. Enslee had come without the retinue of servants that ordinarily preceded his august appearance. In fact, the adventure was as unlike Enslee as it was uncongenial to him. He could not and would not see the fun of it.
Martha and Prout offered their service, but Winifred would not let them mar the perfection of her Swiss Family Robinson. She overawed Willie and drove the old couple back to their own cottage.
When they had retired with prophecies of disaster and evil the would-be gipsies felt relieved of all the encumbrances of civilization. Winifred called it a return to nature. For the time being, however, the chief emotion was one of blissful weariness. Host and guests had kept themselves keyed up all season, like instruments in a concert, and now that the tension was released they seemed to collapse upon themselves.
In front of the great fireplace was a divan almost as big as a life-boat, and cushioned into such a cloud as the gods rested on. Winifred and Mrs. Neff and Alice were lolling on it, and Murray Ten Eyck sat on the edge. Back of it was the usual living-room table with a pile or two of books and magazines.
Persis paused for a moment, looking over the books to select something to take up to her room. She pushed them about with indifference.
"Last year's novels!" she smiled. "As thrilling as last year's birds' nests."
She turned up an illustrated society weekly of a former spring. The frontispiece held her a moment, and she shook her head.
"And last year's reputations. Here's a big portrait of Mrs. Richard Lanthorpe and her two children." She read the caption aloud: "'Prominent young matron who is just opening her Newport villa. Though a devoted mother to her charming little daughters, Mrs. Lanthorpe is also well known as a skilful whip.'"
"Good Lord!" said Winifred, reaching out her hand. "Let me see the cat. A whip, eh? You could drive a coach and four through her reputation now."
Mrs. Neff took the paper from her hand. "Her husband got the kiddies. Pretty little tikes, too."
"She sold 'em for the Newport villa," said Alice, looking over her mother's shoulder. Mrs. Neff turned on her with a glare of amazement.
"Where do you children pick up such things?"
"I'm not children," said Alice, "and the papers were full of it."
"Mrs. Dicky was up here last spring for a week-end with her husband," said Willie. "And so was the other man. What's his name? Later I heard that people had been talking a lot even then, but I never suspected anything till later."
"You never would, Willie," said Mrs. Neff. She stared at the picture. "She's really very good-looking, and she wasn't a bad sort altogether. I wonder which one of us will be gone next winter?"
"You, probably," Willie snickered, and the others laughed lazily. But Mrs. Neff bristled.
"I don't see why you have to laugh. Am I too old to misbehave?"
"Far from it, darling!" said Willie. "You're just at the dangerous age. I--er--I don't mean exactly that, either."
Mrs. Neff turned a page hastily. "Here's a picture of Deborah Reeve in her coming-out gown."
"She came out so far and so fast she went right back," said Ten Eyck, and explained to Forbes: "Hesitated between her riding-master and her mother's chauffeur, and finally ran off with the first officer of her father's yacht. She was a born democrat."
"Here's a snapshot of Mrs. Tom Corliss at the Meadowbrook Steeplechase. Look, that's 'Pup' Mowat standing with her. Good Lord, he was hanging round her a year ago, and people are just beginning to notice. Haven't they been clever? A whole year under the rose and right under the public's nose."
"Tom Corliss will be finding it out before long," said Winifred.
"Oh no," said Willie, "I've discovered that the husband is always the last to find out." And he tossed his head in careless pride at the novelty of his pronouncement.
"Isn't Willie the observing little thing?" said Winifred. The others exchanged glances of contemptuous amusement while their host looked wise.
Persis strolled round to the divan, took Murray by the ear, and hoisted him from his place.
"No, thanks, Murray," she said. "I couldn't think of taking your seat." And dropped into it.
"What are we going to do for amusement to-night?" said Willie. "Who wants to play auction?"
"Hush!" said Mrs. Neff.
"Shall we have some music, then?" A general declination. "Some singing? A dance?"
They refused even that, and he grew desperate.
"Charades?"
"Shut up!" came from the crowd.
"I don't want to be entertained," said Persis. "I'm never so miserable as when I'm being entertained."
Everybody approved. Just to be let alone was a luxury.
Willie ventured a last retort: "Anybody want a drink?"
Everybody wanted a drink. Willie went to a side-wall and groped for a button, pushed it and held it, then resumed his place before the fire. After a time he pushed it again.
"Where is everybody?" he snapped. Then the truth dawned on him again. "Good Lord, we're marooned!"
Winifred chuckled at the situation. "You'll have to be your own barkeep, Willie. Go rustle us what you can find."
"But everything would be in the cellar," he answered. "If there's anything here at all, which I doubt. And the key is in town. Couldn't trust Prout with it. Fine old gardener--give his life to save a peony--but he's death on liquor. I couldn't trust him to order in drinkables--besides, I forgot."
There were groans of horror.
"'Water, water, everywhere,'" said Ten Eyck, "'and not a drop to drink.'"
"It's bad enough having no servants to wait on us," Mrs. Neff pondered, "but who's to do our thinking for us? Which'll we die of first? thirst or starvation?"
"We'll get in a supply from the village to-morrow," said Willie, handsomely.
"To-morrow never comes," said Winifred.
For lack of artificial stimulus the momentary enthusiasm lapsed again. Nobody cared even to read. The fireplace was books enough.
Forbes and Ten Eyck stood at either end of the mantel, mere supporting statuary, their heads in shadow. Willie teetered at the center of the hearth, toasting his coat-tails.
The four women occupied the divan, sketched out brilliantly against the dark like a group portrait of Sargent's. The light worked over their images as a painter works, making and illuminating shadows, touching a strand of hair or a cheek-bone with a high light, modeling with a streak of red some lifted muscle, then brushing it off again.
The poses of the women were as various as their bodies and souls. At one corner Mrs. Neff sat erect among the cushions in a sleepy stateliness. Winifred filled the other corner like another heap of cushions, hardly moving except to flick her cigarette ashes on the floor to the acute distress of Willie's neat soul. Alice drooped with arched spine in a young girl's slump, and clung to a hand of Persis', doubtless wishing it were Stowe Webb's. Persis sat cross-legged, a smoking Sultana, her chin on the back of one hand, one elbow on one knee.
From his coign of shadow Forbes watched them. Vague reverie held them all. The very shadows seemed to breathe unevenly in restless meditation. The fire-logs alone conversed aloud in mysterious whispers, with crackling epigrams.
Forbes wondered at the group, so real and so unreal. He wondered what they were thinking of, each in her castle of self, each with her yearnings backward and forward. Winifred was wishing her lover there, perhaps, and that her slim and gracile soul were not mislodged in so determinedly fat a body; Mrs. Neff was wishing, perhaps, that her gray hair and her calendar of years did not so thwart the young, romantic girl that housed in her body, and must sleep alone, perhaps, forever. Suddenly Forbes wished that he had not smiled so ruthlessly at the thought of her expecting to be courted. Her longings were pitiful, perhaps, but not ridiculous.
It was easy to guess at Alice's thoughts. She was wishing to be not so young and curbed by authority. She was years older than Juliet had been when she went to the church with Romeo and threw him the ladder and preceded him to the tomb; yet Alice's well-matured desires were smiled away and patronized as childish.
And Persis: what were the thoughts that burned within her soul and twitched at her fingers, or tugged at her eyebrows, shook her eyelids, or tightened her lips? Was she thinking of Forbes as he was thinking of her?
Suddenly her drooping bosom expanded with a great breath, her lips parted, her eyes widened, her hand rose. She was about to speak. What would she say?
She yawned. Her hand automatically came up for politeness' sake, but lingered to pat her straining lips as if in approval. Her eyes blurred and fairly writhed. All the muscles of her divine beauty were contorted. She was not so much yawning as yawned. She was enjoying it, too, and as it ended she sighed over it as over a sweetmeat. The musing goddess had been suddenly restored to humanity with a thump.
Her comfortable sigh was echoed and her yawn outdone by Winifred, who moaned:
"I'm so damned sleepy I'll turn in here if the rest of you will get off the bed."
Then Alice yawned and wriggled, and Mrs. Neff gaped with a slight restraint and staggered to her feet.
"I'm on my way. I'd be bored to death if I weren't so excited over the wonderful sleep I'm to have. I hope I don't wake up for a week."
"I hope you don't," said Willie, thrusting out his arms in an all-embracing oscitation.
There was an epidemic of yawns, and they staggered to the console table where a long row of candles waited. Ten Eyck lighted them and distributed them, and the line moved on like a drunken torchlight procession, helped and hindered one another up, and sang out faint "Good nights" as they dispersed in the upper hall.
Doors were closed, only to be flung open with wails of distress. Martha and Prout had lugged all the trunks and suit-cases and handbags to the wrong rooms.
The three men were compelled to act as porters. Willie was furious and full of "I told you so's"; but Ten Eyck impersonated the transfer-men he had met, and had a different dialect for every room.
Forbes went timidly into the exquisite apartment where Persis was ensconced. It was a shrine to him, and he averted his eyes from the carved and lace-adorned altar of her bed.
But Ten Eyck turned back to pound on the door and put in his palm, whining:
"Don't forget the poor baggage-smasher, lady."
Persis opened the door a trifle and gave him a twenty-five-cent piece. She held out another for Forbes, and he took it with a foolish rapture.
Ten Eyck bit his coin and touched his hat, with a husky murmur of:
"'Ch obliged, mum! 'Ch obliged!"
Forbes kept his for a lucky piece--the first keepsake he had had from her.
