_ CHAPTER XI
It was April before Steve found himself visiting with Mary Faithful again and admiring as heartily as Luke had admired the new apartment Mary had chosen for her family.
It had, to Steve's mind, the same delightful air of freedom and attractive shabbiness that he had come to consider as essential for a true home. While Beatrice was launched on her new object in life--making the house into a villa, from upholstering a gondola in sky-blue satin and expecting people to use it as a sofa to having the walls frescoed with fat, pouting cherubs--Mary had selected funny old chairs and soft shades of blue cretonne found in the remnant department, queer pottery, Indian blankets, and a set of blue dishes which just naturally demanded to be heaped with good things and eaten before an open fire at Sunday-night supper.
The whole expense came within Mary's economical pocketbook, yet it seemed to Steve to have the combined richness of a Persian palace and the geniality of a nursery on Christmas Eve.
He deliberately invented an excuse to call, some detail of work which, more easily than not, could have waited until the next day. He was not only using the detail of work as a means to visit Mary but as an excuse to escape a parlour lecture on "What astral vibrations does your given name bring you?" by a pale-faced young woman. The pale-faced young woman boasted of an advanced soul and was making a snug bank account from the rich set in undertaking occult analyses of their names by which to decide whether or not the accompanying astral vibrations harmonized with their auras; and if they did not--and were therefore detrimental and hampering to spiritual development and material progress--she would evolve occult names for them which would be sort of spiritual bits of cheese in material mousetraps baiting and capturing all the good things of this world and the next.
Convinced that Beatrice was not the proper name for her the Gorgeous Girl had ordered a chart of cabalistic signs and mystical statements, the sum total of which was that Radia was the name the astral forces wished her to be called, and by using this name she would develop into a wonderful medium. She paid fifty dollars to discover that she ought to be called Radia and that her aura was of smoky lavender, denoting an advanced soul--according to the pale-faced young woman, who had tired of teaching nonsensical flappers, had no chance to marry, and had hit upon this as her means of painlessly extracting a little
joie de vie.
Declining to learn his astral name Steve left Gaylord to mop up the astral vibrations. Beatrice did not mind his absence though he neglected to say that the work was to be done at Miss Faithful's apartment and not at the office. Never having questioned Steve in such details Beatrice merely murmured inwardly that goat tending in one's past strangely enough led to pigheadedness in later life. It was a relief to have him away, for if drawn into an argument he still thumped his fists. For everyday living Beatrice preferred her own pet robins and angel-ducks, as she called the boys of the younger set, who flocked to flirt with her because she was extremely rich and pretty and they were in no danger of being matrimonially entangled.
Of course Gaylord ate up this occult-name affair. It was discovered that Gaylord's was a most hampering name and had his parents only consulted the stars and named him Scintar--who knows to what heights he might not have risen? Trudy's astral title should have been Urcia, which she now adopted, blushing deeply as she recalled the vulgar Babseley and Bubseley of former days. But when Aunt Belle was informed that Cinil was the cognomen needed to make her discover an Indian-summer millionaire waiting to bestow his heart upon her Mark Constantine had packed his bags and departed unceremoniously for Hot Springs.
Meantime, Mary did not know just how to treat this imperious lonesome young man who came boldly into her household without apology or warning.
"You don't know how often I've wanted to come and see you," he said, unashamedly, delighted that Luke was out of the way and he could play in his fashion the same as Beatrice did in hers. "It isn't business, really. I just wanted to talk to you. You assume so much formality at the office that though I admit it may be wise I miss the real you."
"You mean you just trumped up an excuse----"
Then Mary began to laugh.
"I do. The DeGraff muddle can wait. It's nice to be able just to sprawl about--sprawl in a comfortable old chair. I like this little room. We are being turned into an Italian villa, you know. I don't quite see how I'll ever live up to it." As he spoke he took out a plebeian tobacco pouch and a nondescript pipe. "May I?"
"Do! Only you ought not to be here at all"--trying to be severe, and failing.
"Why not?"
"Because you think only of yourself and of what you wish," she surprised him by answering. "Why not think of the other chap occasionally?"
He paused in the lighting of his pipe. "Oh--you mean my coming here." He looked like an unjustly punished child without redress. "You mean to consign me to the gloom of the grill room or one of those slippery leather chairs in a far corner of the club? Come, you can't say that. I won't listen if you do. I just want to be friends with someone."
With unsuspected coquetry she suggested: "Why not your wife?"
"We're not friends--merely married." He lit his pipe and flipped the match away. "Cheap to say, isn't it? Don't look at me like that; you make me quite conscience-stricken. You seem to be aiming at me as directly as a small boy aims his snowball. Why?"
"It wouldn't do the slightest good to tell you what I think."
"Yes, it would; someone must tell me. I've never been as lonesome in my life as now--when I'm a rich man and the husband of a very lovely woman. It sort of chills me to the marrow at first thought. I've been in a delirium, quite irresponsible. These last few months I've been coming down to earth. Only instead of getting my feet planted firmly on the sod I think I've struck a quicksand bed. I say, lend us a hand."
"Why ask me?"
"I don't just know. I don't think I shall ever be quite so sure of anything again. After all, a person has just so much capacity for joy and sorrow, and so much energy, and so much will power, allotted at birth; and if he chooses to go burn it all up in one fell swoop doing one thing--he is at liberty to do so; but he is not given any second helping. Isn't that true? Quite a terrible thing to realize when you know you used up your joy allotment in anticipation--and it has been so much keener and finer than any of the realization. And all my energy went into making money the easiest way I could; but it does not pay."
Mary clasped her hands tightly in her lap; she was afraid to let him see her joy at the long-awaited confession.
"Yet you ask me, a reliable machine, to help you in your perplexities?"
"I don't think of you as a capable machine any more. I used to, that is true enough. I didn't know or care whether your hair was red or your eyes green--but I know now that you have gray eyes, and----"
"You really want to know my opinions?" she interrupted, breathlessly.
"As much as I used to seek out the stock reports."
"Well--I think people who have planned as exactly as you and Mr. Constantine have planned always banish real principle at the start. After a time you are punished by having an almost fungous growth of sickly conscience--you don't want to face the truth of things, yet isolated incidents, sentimental memories, certain sights and definite statements annoy, haunt, heartbreak you! Still, you have lost your principle, the backbone of the soul, and the fungus-like growth of conscience is such a clumsy imitation--like a paper rose stuck in the ground. Mr. Constantine's type--your type--is flourishing and multiplying among us, I fear, and such are the wishbone, or sickly conscience, and not the backbone, or sterling principle, of the nation. After all, fortunes alone do not make real gentility--thanks be! But you know as well as I that all the--the Gorgeous Girls and their kind and you and I and the next chap we meet belong to the great majority, and of that we have every right to be proud.
"Furthermore, we ought to hold to our place in the social scheme and be the backbone of the nation, keep our principle and not be nagged eternally by a sickly conscience after we have gone and sold our birthrights. Gorgeous Girls and their sort have the sole fortification of dollars, endless dollars, endless price tags; their whims bring whole wings of foreign castles floating across the ocean by the wholesale to be reassembled somewhere in good old helpless Illinois or New Jersey. And these people try to be everything but good old American stock--which is quite wrong, for their example causes spendthrifts and Bolsheviki to flourish without end."
"Go on," he said, almost sulkily, as she paused.
"I've watched it for thirteen years from the various angles of the working girl with an average amount of brain and disposition. When all is said and done you really have to work before you have earned the right to pass judgment--work--not read or patronize or take someone else's statements as final. Do you know how I used to identify the kinds of people that rode in the street cars with me?... From seven until eight there were the Frumps. The majority boasted of white kid boots or someone's discarded near-electric-seal jacket, plumes in their hats, and an absence of warm woollens. And everyone yawned, between patting thin cheeks with soiled face chamois, 'What d'ja do las' night?'
"From eight to nine came the Funnies; and the majority had white kid boots and flimsy silk frocks cut as low as our grandmothers' party gowns, and plumes in their hats and silver vanity cases. Their main topics of conversation were: 'He said,' and 'She said,' and 'I don't care if I'm late. I'm going to quit anyway!'
"From nine until noon came the Frills--the wives of modest-salaried men who cannot motor, yet write to out-of-town relatives that they do so.
"And every one of those Frumps, Funnies, and Frills apes the Gorgeous-Girl kind--white kids for shopping, low-cut pumps in January, bizarre coat, chiffon waist disclosing a thin little neck fairly panting for protection, rouged cheeks, and a plume in her hat--and not a cent of savings in the bank!
"Now there's something wrong when we've come to this, and the wrong does not lie with these people but with those they imitate--Gorgeous Girls, new-rich with sickly consciences and lack of principle and common sense; and these Gorgeous Girls in turn take their styles, slang phrases, and modes of recreation, as well as theories of life from the boldest dancer, the most sensational chorus girl--and it's wrong and not what America should be called upon to endure. And it all reverts back in a sense to you busy, unprincipled, yet conscience-stricken American business men who write checks for these Gorgeous Girls--and the heathen in Africa--and wonder why golf doesn't bring your blood pressure down to normal--when your grandfather had such a wonderful constitution at eighty-four! Don't you know that get-rich-quick people always pay a usurer's interest on the suddenly accumulated principle?"
"Keep on," he said in the same surly tone.
"And when I go downtown and view the weary, unwashed females and the overly ambitious painted ones, people in impossible bargain shoes and summer furs; fat men in plaid suits and Alpine hats; undernourished children being dragged along by unthinking adults; stray dogs wistfully sniffing at passers-by in hopes of finding a permanent friend; tired, blind work horses standing in the sun and resignedly being overloaded for the day's haul; fire sales of fur coats; candy sales of gooey hunks; a jewellery special of earrings warranted to betray no tarnish until well after Christmas; brokers' ads and vaudeville billboards and rows upon rows of awful, huddled-up, gardenless homes with families lodged somewhere between the first and twelfth stories--the general chasing after nothing, saving nothing and, saddest of all, the complacent delusion that they have achieved something well worth while--it makes me willing to earn and learn as I do."
"Don't leave me in the quicksand. What can we do about it?"
"Make that sort of American woman realize that she is more needed in the home and can accomplish more with that as her goal than in any other place in the world. You don't know all my dreams for the American woman--don't you think that this Gorgeous Girl parasitical type is a result of the Victorian revolt? Too late for themselves the Victorian matrons said: 'Our daughters shall never slave as we have done; they shall be ladies--and have careers, too, bless their hearts.' The Victorian matrons were emerging from the unfair conditions of ignorance and drudgery and they could realize only one side of the argument--that all work and no play made Jill quite a stupid girl.
"But we must grasp the other side of the matter--that all play and no work make her simply impossible; that culture and self-sufficiency can go hand in hand. The American woman really is--and must continue to be--the all-round, regular fellow of the feminine world. Then she will not only teach a great and needed truth to her backward European sisters but she will produce a great future race. American women have tried frivolity in nearly every form and they have worked seriously likewise; they have intruded into men's professions and careers and in cases have beaten men at their own game. They have successfully broken down the narrow prejudice and limitations which the Victorian era tried making immortal under the title of sentiment--but after they have had the reward of victory and the knowledge of the game, why not be square, as they really are, and do the part the Great Plan meant them to do? Be women first--let the career take the woman if need be, but always thank the good Lord if it needn't be."
"And to think you have been working for me," Steve said, softly.
"I know that culture and enjoyment of life may be yoked with so-called drudgery. I know, too, that women are retiring not in defeat but with honour and victory in its truest sense when they step out of business life back to their homes. Nor are they empty-handed like the Victorian matrons; but with the energy of tried and true warriors, the ballot in one hand, the child led by the other, they are in a position to right old wrongs, for they have won new rights. They will be able to put into practice in their homes all they have gleaned from the sojourn in the world; the ill-given service of unfitted menials will disappear, as will waste and nerve-racking detail.
"And love must be the leavener of it all--with all her progress and her ability, trained talents and clever logic, the American woman must not and will not renounce her romance--for it is part of God's very promise of immortality."
"How often may I come here?" he begged.
Mary shook her head. "You've got me started, as Luke says, and I'm hard to check. But have you never thought that out of all the world the American woman is the only woman who cooks and serves her dinner if it is necessary, adjourns to her parlour afterward and discusses poetry and politics and the latest style hat with her guests? For she has learned how to possess true democracy, not rebellion, courage and not hysterical threats to play the rebel, the slacker.
"And now I'll make you a cup of coffee. And never let me catch you here again!"
When Luke arrived home he found Steve O'Valley basking in the big chair he was wont to occupy, though it was past ten o'clock and he had anticipated questions from Mary as to his tardiness. Instead he found a very rosy-cheeked, almost sunrise-eyed sister who stammered her greeting as the flustered Mr. O'Valley found his hat and the neglected business portfolio and took his leave. _