_ BOOK III. IN WASHINGTON
CHAPTER X
The best place for a view is in one's back yard; then it is one's own. If it is in the front yard, then the house is only part of the public's view.
In London Marie Louise had lived at Sir Joseph Webling's home, its gray, fog-stained, smoked-begrimed front flush with the pavement. But back of the house was a high-walled garden with a fountain that never played. There was a great rug of English-green grass, very green all winter and still greener all summer. At an appropriate spot was a tree; a tea-table sat under it; in blossom-time it sprinkled pink petals on the garden hats of the women; and on the grass they fell, to twist Tennyson, softlier than tired eyelids on tired eyes.
So Marie Louise adored her new home with its unpromising entrance and its superb surprise from the rear windows. When she broke the news to Polly Widdicombe, that she was leaving her, they had a good fight over it. Yet Polly could hardly insist that Marie Louise stay with her forever, especially when Marie Louise had a perfectly good home of her own.
Polly went along for a morning of reconstruction work. There were pictures, chairs, cushions, and knickknacks that simply had to be hidden away. The original tenants evidently had the theory that a bare space on a wall or a table was as indecent as on a person's person.
They had taken crude little chromos and boxed them in gaudy frames, many of whose atrocities were aggravated by panels of plush of a color that could hardly be described by any other name than fermented prune. Over the corner of these they had thrown "throws" or drapes of malicious magenta horribly figured in ruthless incompatibilities.
Chairs of unexplainable framework were upholstered with fabrics of studied delirium. Every mantel was an exhibit of models of what not to do. When Henry James said that Americans had no end of taste, but most of it was bad, he must have based his conclusions on such a conglomerate as this.
Polly and Marie Louise found some of the furniture bad enough to be amusing. But they toted a vanload of it into closets and storerooms. Where the pictures came away they left staring spaces of unfaded wall-paper. Still, they were preferable to the pictures.
By noon the women were exhausted. They washed their dust-smutted hands and faces and exclaimed upon the black water they left. But the exercise had given them appetite, and when Marie Louise locked the front door she felt all the comfort of a householder. She had a home of her very own to lock up, and though she had roamed through pleasures and palaces, she agreed that, be it ever so horrible, there's no place like home.
She and Polly were early to their luncheon engagement with Major Widdicombe. Their appetites disputed the clock. Polly decided to telephone her husband for Heaven's sake to come at once to her rescue.
While Polly was telephoning Marie Louise sat waiting on a divan. Her muscles were so tired that she grew nearly as placidly animal as her sister in the Pennsylvania Station. She was as different in every other way as possible. Her life, her environment, her ambitions, had been completely alien to anything Mrs. Nuddle had known. She had been educated and evolved by entirely different joys and sorrows, fears and successes.
Mrs. Nuddle had been afraid that her husband would beat her again, or kill one of the children in his rage, or get himself sent to prison or to the chair; Mrs. Nuddle had been afraid that the children would be run over in the street, would pull a boilerful of boiling water over onto them, or steal, or go wrong in any of the myriad ways that children have of going wrong. Mrs. Nuddle's ecstasies were a job well done, a word of praise from a customer, a chance to sit down, an interval without pain or worry when her children were asleep, or when her husband was working and treating her as well as one treats an old horse.
Of such was the kingdom of Mrs. Nuddle.
Marie Louise had dwelt in a world no more and no less harrowing, but infinitely unlike. The two sisters were no longer related to each other by any ties except blood kinship. Mrs. Nuddle was a good woman gone wrong, Marie Louise a goodish woman gone variously; Mrs. Nuddle a poor advertisement of a life spent in honest toil, early rising, early bedding, churchgoing, and rigid economy; Marie Louise a most attractive evidence of how much depends on a careful carriage, a cultivated taste in clothes, and an elegant acquaintance.
At last, after years of groping toward each other, the sisters were to be brought together. But there was to be an intervention. Even while Marie Louise sat relaxed in a fatigue that she would have called contentment trouble was stealing toward her.
The spider who came and sat beside this Miss Muffet was Nicky Easton. He frightened her, but he would not let her run away.
As he dropped to her side she rose with a gasp, but he pressed her back with a hasty grip on her arm and a mandatory prayer:
"Wait once, pleass."
The men who had shadowed Marie Louise had months before given her up as hopelessly correct. But guardian angels were still provided for Nicky Easton; and one of them, seeing this meeting, took Marie Louise back into the select coterie of the suspects.
There's no cure for your bodily aches and pains like terror. It lifts the paralytic from his bed, makes the lame scurry, and gives the blind eyes enough for running. Marie Louise's fatigue fell from her like a burden whose straps are slit.
When Nicky said: "I could not find you in New York. Now we are here we can have a little talkink," she stammered: "Not here! Not now!"
"Why not, pleass?"
"I have an engagement--a friend--she has just gone to telephone a moment."
"You are ashamed of me, then?"
She let him have it. "Yes!"
He winced at the slap in the face.
She went on: "Besides, she knows you. Her husband is an officer in the army. I can't talk to you here."
"Where, then, and when?"
"Any time--any place--but here."
"Any time is no time. You tell me, or I stay now."
"Come to--to my house."
"You have a howiss, then?"
"Yes. I just took it to-day. I shall be there this afternoon--at three, if you will go."
"Very goot. The address is--"
She gave it; he repeated it, mumbled, "At sree o'clock I am there," and glided away just as Polly returned.
They were eating a consomme madrilene when the Major arrived. He dutifully ate what his wife had selected for him, and listened amiably to what she had to tell him about her morning, though he was bursting to tell her about his. Polly made a vivid picture of Marie Louise's new home, ending with:
"Everything on God's earth in it except a piano and a book."
This reminded Marie Louise of the books she had read on ship-building, and she asked if she might borrow them. Polly made a woeful face at this.
"My dear! When a woman starts to reading up on a subject a man is interested in, she's lost--and so is he. Beware of it, my dear."
Tom demurred: "Go right on, Marie Louise, so that you can take an intelligent interest in what your husband is working on."
"My husband!" said Marie Louise. "Aren't you both a trifle premature?"
Polly went glibly on: "Don't listen to Tom, my dear. What does he know about what a man wants his wife to take an intelligent interest in? Once a woman knows about her husband's business, he's finished with her and ready for the next. Tom's been trying to tell me for ten years what he's working at, and I haven't the faintest idea yet. It always gives him something to hope for. When he comes home of evenings he can always say, 'Perhaps to-night's the night when she'll listen.' But once you listen intelligently and really understand, he's through with you, and he'll quit you for some pink-cheeked ignoramus who hasn't heard about it yet."
Marie Louise, being a woman, knew how to get her message to another woman; the way seems to be to talk right through her talk. The acute creatures have ears to hear with and mouths to talk with, and they apparently find no difficulty in using both at the same time. Somewhere along about the middle of Polly's discourse Marie Louise began to answer it before it was finished. Why should she wait when she knew what was coming? So she said contemporaneously and covocally:
"But I'm not going to marry a ship-builder, my dear. Don't be absurd! I'm not planning to take an intelligent interest in Mr. Davidge's business. I'm planning to take an intelligent interest in my own. I'm going to be a ship-builder myself, and I want to learn the A B C's."
They finished that argument at the same time and went on together down the next stretch in a perfect team:
"Oh, well of course, if "Mr. Davidge tells me,"
that's the case," asserted Marie Louise explained, "that
Polly, "then you're quite women are needed in ship-
crazy--unless you're simply building, and that anybody
hunting for a new sensation. can learn. In fact, every-
And on that score I'll admit body has to, anyway; so
that it sounds rather interest- I've got as good a chance as
ing. I may take a whack at a man. I'm as strong as a
it myself. I'm quite fed up horse. Fine! Come along,
on bandages and that sort of and we'll build a U-boat
thing. Get me a job in the chaser together. Mr. Davidge
same factory or whatever would be delighted to
they call it. Will you?" have you, I'm sure."
This was arrant hubbub to the mere man who was not capable of carrying on a conversation except by the slow, primitive methods of Greek drama, strophe and antistrophe, one talking while the other listened, then
vice versa.
So he had time to remember that he had something to remember, and to dig it up. He broke in on the dialogue:
"By the way, that reminds me, Marie Louise. There's a man in town looking for you."
"Looking for me!" Marie Louise gasped, alert as an antelope at once. "What was his name?"
"I can't seem to recall it. I'll have it in a minute. He didn't impress me very favorably, so I didn't tell him you were living with us."
Polly turned on Tom: "Come along, you poor nut! I hate riddles, and so does Marie Louise."
"That's it!" Tom cried. "
Riddle--Nuddle. His name is Nuddle. Do you know a man named Nuddle?"
The name conveyed nothing to Marie Louise except a suspicion that Mr. Verrinder had chosen some pseudonym.
"What was his nationality?" she asked. "English?"
"I should say not! He was as Amurrican as a piece of pungkin pie."
Marie Louise felt a little relieved, but still at sea. When Widdicombe asked what message he should take back her curiosity led her to brave her fate and know the worst:
"Tell him to come to my house at any time this afternoon--no, not before five. I have some shopping to do, and the servants to engage."
She did not ask Polly to go with her, and Polly took the hint conveyed in Marie Louise's remark as they left the dining-room, "I've a little telephoning to do."
Polly went her way, and Marie Louise made a pretext of telephoning.
Major Widdicombe did not see Jake Nuddle as he went down the steps, for the reason that Jake saw him first and drew his wife aside. He wondered what had become of Marie Louise.
Jake and his wife hung about nonplussed for a few minutes, till Marie Louise came out. She had waited only to make sure that Tom and Polly got away. When she came down the steps she cast a casual glance at Jake and her sister, who came toward her eagerly. But she assumed that they were looking at some one else, for they meant nothing to her eyes.
She had indeed never seen this sister before. The sister who waddled toward her was not the sister she had left in Wakefield years before. That sister was young and lean and a maid. Marriage and hard work and children had swaddled this sister in bundles of strange flesh and drawn the face in new lines.
Marie Louise turned her back on her, but heard across her shoulder the poignant call:
"Mamise!"
That voice was the same. It had not lost its own peculiar cry, and it reverted the years and altered the scene like a magician's "Abracadabra!"
Marie Louise swung round just in time to receive the full brunt of her sister's charge. The repeated name identified the strange-looking matron as the girl grown old, and Marie Louise gathered her into her arms with a fierce homesickness. Her loneliness had found what it needed. She had kinfolk now, and she sobbed: "Abbie darling! My darling Abbie!" while Abbie wept: "Mamise! Oh, my poor little Mamise!"
A cluster of cab-drivers wondered what it was all about, but Jake Nuddle felt triumphant. Marie Louise looked good to him as he looked her over, and for the nonce he was content to have the slim, round fashionable creature enveloped in his wife's arms for a sister-in-law.
Abbie, a little homelier than ever with her face blubbery and tear-drenched, turned to introduce what she had drawn in the matrimonial lottery.
"Mamise!" she said. "I want you should meet my husbin'."
"I'm delighted!" said Mamise, before she saw her sister's fate. She was thorough-trained if not thorough-born, and she took the shock without reeling.
Jake's hand was not as rough so it ought to have been, and his cordiality was sincere as he growled:
"Pleaster meecher, Mamise."
He was ready already with her first name, but she had nothing to call him by. It never occurred to Abbie that her sister would not instinctively know a name so familiar to Mrs. Nuddle as Mr. Nuddle, and it was a long while before Marie Louise managed to pick it up and piece it together.
Her embarrassment at meeting Jake was complete. She asked:
"Where are you living--here in Washington?"
"Laws, no!" said Abbie; and that reminded her of the bundles she had dropped at the sight of Mamise. They had played havoc with the sidewalk traffic, but she hurried to regain them.
Jake could be the gentleman when there was somebody looking who counted. So he checked his wife with amazement at the preposterousness of her carrying bundles while Sir Walter Raleigh was at hand. He picked them up and brought them to Marie Louise's feet, disgusted at the stupid amazement of his wife, who did not have sense enough to conceal it. Marie Louise was growing alarmed at the perfect plebeiance of her kith. She was unutterably ashamed of herself for noticing such things, but the eye is not to blame for what it can't help seeing, nor the ear for what is forced upon it. She had a feeling that the first thing to do was to get her sister in out of the rain of glances from the passers-by.
"You must come to me at once," she said. "I've just taken a house. I've got no servants in yet, and you'll have to put up with it as it is."
Abbie gasped at the "servants." She noted the authority with which Marie Louise beckoned a chauffeur and pointed to the bundles, which he hastened to seize.
Abbie was overawed by the grandeur of her first automobile and showed it on her face. She saw many palaces on the way and expected Marie Louise to stop at any of them. When the car drew up at Marie Louise's home Abbie was bitterly disappointed; but when she got inside she found her dream of paradise. Marie Louise was distressed at Abbie's loud praise of the general effect and her unfailing instinct for picking out the worst things on the walls or the floors. This distress caused a counter-distress of self-rebuke.
Jake was on his dignity at first, but finally he unbent enough to take off his coat, hang it over a chair, and stretch himself out on a divan whose ulterior maroon did not disturb his repose in the least.
"This is what I call something like," he said; and then, "And now, Mamise, set in and tell us all about yourself."
This was the last thing Mamise wanted to do, and she evaded with a plea:
"I can wait. I want to hear all about you, Abbie darling. How are you, and how long have you been married, and where do you live?"
"Goin' on eight years come next October, and we got three childern. I been right poorly lately. Don't seem to take as much interest in worshin' as I useter."
"Washing!" Marie Louise exclaimed. "You don't wash, do you? That is, I mean to say--professionally?"
"Yes, I worsh. Do right smart of work, too."
Marie Louise was overwhelmed. She had a hundred thousand dollars, and her sister was a--washerwoman! It was intolerable. She glanced at Jake.
"But Mr.--your husband--"
"Oh, Jake, he works--off and on. But he ain't got what you might call a hankerin' for it. He can take work or let it alone. I can't say as much for him when it comes to licker. Fact is, some the women say, 'Why, Mrs. Nuddle, how do you ever--'"
"Your name isn't--it isn't Nuddle, is it?" Marie Louise broke in.
"Sure it is. What did you think it was?"
So the sleeping brother-in-law was the mysterious inquirer. That solved one of her day's puzzles and solved it very tamely. So many of life's mysteries, like so many of fiction's, peter out at the end. They don't sustain.
Marie Louise still belonged to the obsolescent generation that believed it a husband's duty to support his wife by his own labor. The thought of her sister supporting a worthless husband by her own toil was odious. The first task was to get Jake to work. It was only natural that she should think of her own new mania.
She spoke so eagerly that she woke Jake when she said: "I have it! Why doesn't your husband go in for ship-building?"
Marie Louise told him about Davidge and what Davidge had said of the need of men. She was sure that she could get him a splendid job, and that Mr. Davidge would do anything for her.
Jake was about to rebuke such impudence as it deserved, but a thought struck him, and he chewed it over. Among the gang of idealists he consorted with, or at least salooned with, the dearest ambition of all was to turn America's dream of a vast fleet of ships into a nightmare of failure. In order to secure "just recognition" for the workman they would cause him to be recognized as both a loafer and a traitor--that was their ideal of labor.
As Marie Louise with unwitting enthusiasm rhapsodized over the shipyard Jake's interest kindled. To get into a shipyard just growing, and spread his doctrines among the men as they came in, to bring off strikes and to play tricks with machinery everywhere, to wreck launching-ways so that hulls that escaped all other attacks would crack through and stick--it was a Golconda of opportunities for this modern conquistador. He could hardly keep his face straight till he heard Marie Louise out. He fooled her entirely with his ardor; and when he asked, "Do you think your gentleman friend, this man Davidge, would really give me a job?" she cried, with more enthusiasm than tact:
"I know he would. He'd give anybody a job. Besides, I'm going to take one myself. And, Abbie honey, what would you say to your becoming a ship-builder, too? It would be immensely easier and pleasanter than washing clothes."
Before Abbie could recover the breath she lost at the picture of herself as a builder of ships the door-bell rang. Abbie peeked and whispered:
"It's a man."
"Do you suppose it's that feller Davidge?" said Jake.
"No, it's--it's--somebody else," said Marie Louise, who knew who it was without looking.
She was at her wit's end now. Nicky Easton was at the door, and a sister and a brother-in-law whose existence she had not suspected were in the parlor. _