Complete Stories Page 7

  “Now you know perfectly well, Fan, we can’t have that dog around,” he told her. He used the low voice reserved for underwear and bathroom articles and kindred shady topics. There was all the kindness in his tones that one has for a backward child, but a Gibraltar-like firmness was behind it. “You must be crazy to even think we could for a minute. Why, I wouldn’t give a she-dog houseroom, not for any amount of money. It’s disgusting, that’s what it is.”

  “Well, but, Father—” began Mrs. Durant, her hands again going off into their convulsions.

  “Disgusting,” he repeated. “You have a female around, and you know what happens. All the males in the neighborhood will be running after her. First thing you know, she’d be having puppies—and the way they look after they’ve had them, and all! That would be nice for the children to see, wouldn’t it? I should think you’d think of the children, Fan. No, sir, there’ll be nothing like that around here, not while I know it. Disgusting!”

  “But the children,” she said. “They’ll be just simply——”

  “Now you just leave all that to me,” he reassured her. “I told them the dog could stay, and I’ve never broken a promise yet, have I? Here’s what I’ll do—I’ll wait till they’re asleep, and then I’ll just take this little dog and put it out. Then, in the morning, you can tell them it ran away during the night, see?”

  She nodded. Her husband patted her shoulder, in its crapy-smelling black silk. His peace with the world was once more intact, restored by this simple solution of the little difficulty. Again his mind wrapped itself in the knowledge that everything was all fixed, all ready for a nice, fresh start. His arm was still about his wife’s shoulder as they went on in to dinner.

  American Mercury, September 1924

  A Certain Lady

  My friend, Mrs. Legion, is one of those few, as tradition numbers them, who are New Yorkers by birth. This gives her an appreciable edge on the parvenus who are Manhattanites only by migration. The Legions occupy an apartment on upper Riverside Drive, in a building called “The Emdor”—an apt and amicable blending of the name of the owner’s wife, Emma, with that of his daughter, Doris. Thus, at one crack, are any possible hard feelings averted, and a happy literary effect achieved. “Isn’t it a cute idea?” Mrs. Legion asks you, when she has explained the origin of the title. “Isn’t it,” you answer, without an interrogation point. And there you both are, ready to start all over again.

  Shortly—oh, anywhere from seven to ten minutes—after she has met you, Mrs. Legion is supplying you with all the ground floor information as to why she lives on Riverside Drive, instead of Park Avenue. There is all the sun they get, and that big kitchen, and the superintendent is so obliging, and just look how convenient the busses are. Not for worlds, she promises you, would she dwell in any other section of the city. Yet, oddly enough—just about enough—she may be found frequently inspecting and pricing Park Avenue apartments, and hopefully calling up real estate agents to inquire if the rents in that part of town have taken a change for the better since her last inquiry.

  Although she lives as far from Park Avenue as it is possible to do and still keep out of Jersey, Mrs. Legion is cozily conversant of all the comings and goings, or what have you, of the Avenue dwellers. Breathlessly she pursues the society notes in the daily papers; promptly on their days of publication she buys the magazines dealing with the activities of the socially elect. Only drop a hat, and she can give you anything you want to know in the way of dates, and maiden names, and who married whom, and how they are getting along, if any. She employs nicknames, in referring to members of the favored few hundred, with an easy casualness that gives her remarks a truly homey flavor.

  Naturally, it eats into her time to keep so admirably posted on these matters. And Mrs. Legion is pretty hard pressed for time. You might think, with her husband earning a cheery income, with Junior and Barbara safely in school, and a pleasant sufficiency of maids—two will do it nicely—around the apartment, that Mrs. Legion’s life would follow the course made celebrated by the proverbial Riley; but the days are all too short for her to complete her business. She is always late for her appointments, rushing in a bit breathless, almost embarrassingly apologetic for those things that lack of time has forced her to leave undone. You simply must excuse the way she looks, but she didn’t have a minute to get her hair waved, or, goodness, she must try to crowd in a manicure somehow, or for heaven’s sake, remind her to stop at the baker’s on her way home—she didn’t have a second all morning. Her life is passed in an oddly imperceptible process known as “getting around” to things,—getting around to answer a letter, getting around to having her fur coat done over, getting around to having a talk with Junior’s teacher.

  And then, of course, there is all her shopping to do. Mrs. Legion’s shopping has never yet reached a stage even approaching completion. Rarely a day passes that she must not visit the stores, if not to purchase, then to look around and get an idea or so. To look at her, you realize instantly that it must indeed take time and thought and research for her to assemble her costumes, to get them so faithfully like those worn by all other women of her circumstances. Mrs. Legion and her friends dress with the uniformity of the Tiller girls. Their hats are of the same shape and worn at the same angle, their coiffures meticulously alike, their dresses follow one another closely in material and design, their shoes are of the same last. Not until she has sedulously effaced all traces of individuality does Mrs. Legion feel that she is smart enough to appear in public.

  Duties aside, Mrs. Legion must have her fun, being only human. Her good times consist in meeting her women friends almost daily, either at her house or at one of theirs, and having a real old-fashioned talk. Sometimes this is staged over the bridge table, sometimes over the Mah Jong tiles, sometimes a bit of silky and lacy sewing. The Legion school of conversationalists deals entirely with personalities, nor does it fear to probe deep into the intimate affairs of absent acquaintances. Detailed stories of miserable matrimony and racking separation, of lingering illness and agonizing childbirth and ancestral insanity, of heartbreak and poverty and desertion burble melodiously from the ladies’ cool, smooth, expensively rouged lips.

  The talk is interrupted by the serving of a lavish and imaginative tea, of which Mrs. Legion partakes generously. She is always going to begin dieting next Monday morning.

  For her further diversion, there are literature and the drama. Mrs. Legion is by her own admission a great reader. She has long been a member of the circulating library contained in the stationer’s nearest her. She is saved the wear and tear of selecting appropriate reading matter—there is the nicest girl there, who knows just the sort of thing she likes. Mrs. Legion can seldom tell you the title of a book she reads, and never the author’s name, but she can always give you a pretty comprehensive résumé of the plot. She likes a book because there is the cutest girl in it, or the most attractive man, or because the author says the rawest things,—well, my dear, simply nothing is left to your imagination. And the lifting of any strain on the imagination is regarded, in the Legion circle, as the king of assets.

  In the theatre, she likes best to patronize, even though she must wait weeks to obtain desirable seats, those exhibits which she euphemistically describes as “my dear, they say it’s the most off-color thing you ever saw. I do hope the police don’t stop it before we can get tickets.” She does not care for drama of the drab, the every-day, or the underworld. As she says, she does love to see pretty clothes.

  Sporadically, Mrs. Legion goes in for culture in a really big way, and signs up for a course of lectures on Flemish paintings or current events or interior decoration. The first lecture of the series is largely attended and faithfully quoted: along about the sixth or seventh, only the first row of gilt chairs is occupied. Mrs. Legion has looked on this world for some thirty-seven years, and she has not failed to draw conclusions. So clear are her views that she can dismiss any subject with a single sentence. Of politics, she says t
hat Mrs. Coolidge is awfully sweet looking, and they say she is very popular in Washington. Of the unemployment situation, that these beggars you see in the streets all have big bank accounts and probably most of them own tenement buildings. Of married life, that she honestly believes that Fred Legion would eat steak every night if you’d give it to him. Of the race question, that these Swedes and Irish girls are so independent that she has half a mind to get a couple of darkie servants. Of art and belles lettres, that she wouldn’t live in Greenwich Village if you gave her the place. Of motherhood, that it certainly is hard to know how to dress children when they’re at that awkward age. Of the relation of the sexes, that it’s terrible what women have to go through in this world.

  My friend, Mrs. Legion. Heiress of the ages.

  The New Yorker, February 28, 1925

  The Wonderful Old Gentleman

  If the Bains had striven for years, they could have been no more successful in making their living-room into a small but admirably complete museum of objects suggesting strain, discomfort, or the tomb. Yet they had never even tried for the effect. Some of the articles that the room contained were wedding-presents; some had been put in from time to time as substitutes as their predecessors succumbed to age and wear; a few had been brought along by the Old Gentleman when he had come to make his home with the Bains some five years before.

  It was curious how perfectly they all fitted into the general scheme. It was as if they had all been selected by a single enthusiast to whom time was but little object, so long as he could achieve the eventual result of transforming the Bain living-room into a home chamber of horrors, modified a bit for family use.

  It was a high-ceilinged room, with heavy, dark old woodwork, that brought long and unavoidable thoughts of silver handles and weaving worms. The paper was the color of stale mustard. Its design, once a dashing affair of a darker tone splashed with twinkling gold, had faded into lines and smears that resolved themselves, before the eyes of the sensitive, into hordes of battered heads and tortured profiles, some eye-less, some with clotted gashes for mouths.

  The furniture was dark and cumbersome and subject to painful creakings—sudden, sharp creaks that seemed to be wrung from its brave silence only when it could bear no more. A close, earthy smell came from its dulled tapestry cushions, and try as Mrs. Bain might, furry gray dust accumulated in the crevices.

  The center-table was upheld by the perpetually strained arms of three carved figures, insistently female to the waist, then trailing discreetly off into a confusion of scrolls and scales. Upon it rested a row of blameless books, kept in place at the ends by the straining shoulder-muscles of two bronze-colored plaster elephants, forever pushing at their tedious toil.

  On the heavily carved mantel was a gayly colored figure of a curly-headed peasant boy, ingeniously made so that he sat on the shelf and dangled one leg over. He was in the eternal act of removing a thorn from his chubby foot, his round face realistically wrinkled with the cruel pain. Just above him hung a steel-engraving of a chariot-race, the dust flying, the chariots careening wildly, the drivers ferociously lashing their maddened horses, the horses themselves caught by the artist the moment before their hearts burst, and they dropped in their traces.

  The opposite wall was devoted to the religious in art; a steel-engraving of the Crucifixion, lavish of ghastly detail; a sepia-print of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, the cords cutting deep into the arms writhing from the stake, arrows bristling in the thick, soft-looking body; a water-color copy of a “Mother of Sorrows,” the agonized eyes raised to a cold heaven, great, bitter tears forever on the wan cheeks, paler for the grave-like draperies that wrapped the head.

  Beneath the windows hung a painting in oil of two lost sheep, huddled hopelessly together in the midst of a wild blizzard. This was one of the Old Gentleman’s contributions to the room. Mrs. Bain was wont to observe of it that the frame was worth she didn’t know how much.

  The wall-space beside the door was reserved for a bit of modern art that had once caught Mr. Bain’s eye in a stationer’s window—a colored print, showing a railroad-crossing, with a train flying relentlessly toward it, and a low, red automobile trying to dash across the track before the iron terror shattered it into eternity. Nervous visitors who were given chairs facing this scene usually made opportunity to change their seats before they could give their whole minds to the conversation.

  The ornaments, placed with careful casualness on the table and the upright piano, included a small gilt lion of Lucerne, a little, chipped, plaster Laocoön, and a savage china kitten eternally about to pounce upon a plump and helpless china mouse. This last had been one of the Old Gentleman’s own wedding-gifts. Mrs. Bain explained, in tones low with awe, that it was very old.

  The ash-receivers, of Oriental manufacture, were in the form of grotesque heads, tufted with bits of gray human hair, and given bulging, dead, glassy eyes and mouths stretched into great gapes, into which those who had the heart for it might flick their ashes. Thus the smallest details of the room kept loyally to the spirit of the thing, and carried on the effect.

  But the three people now sitting in the Bains’ living-room were not in the least oppressed by the decorative scheme. Two of them, Mr. and Mrs. Bain, not only had had twenty-eight years of the room to accustom themselves to it, but had been stanch admirers of it from the first. And no surroundings, however morbid, could close in on the aristocratic calm of Mrs. Bain’s sister, Mrs. Whittaker.

  She graciously patronized the very chair she now sat in, smiled kindly on the glass of cider she held in her hand. The Bains were poor, and Mrs. Whittaker had, as it is ingenuously called, married well, and none of them ever lost sight of these facts.

  But Mrs. Whittaker’s attitude of kindly tolerance was not confined to her less fortunate relatives. It extended to friends of her youth, working people, the arts, politics, the United States in general, and God, Who had always supplied her with the best of service. She could have given Him an excellent reference at any time.

  The three people sat with a comfortable look of spending the evening. There was an air of expectancy about them, a not unpleasant little nervousness, as of those who wait for a curtain to rise. Mrs. Bain had brought in cider in the best tumblers, and had served some of her nut cookies in the plate painted by hand with clusters of cherries—the plate she had used for sandwiches when, several years ago, her card club had met at her house.

  She had thought it over a little tonight, before she lifted out the cherry plate, then quickly decided and resolutely heaped it with cookies. After all, it was an occasion—informal, perhaps, but still an occasion. The Old Gentleman was dying upstairs. At five o’clock that afternoon the doctor had said that it would be a surprise to him if the Old Gentleman lasted till the middle of the night—a big surprise, he had augmented.

  There was no need for them to gather at the Old Gentleman’s bedside. He would not have known any of them. In fact, he had not known them for almost a year, addressing them by wrong names and asking them grave, courteous questions about the health of husbands or wives or children who belonged to other branches of the family. And he was quite unconscious now.

  Miss Chester, the nurse who had been with him since “this last stroke,” as Mrs. Bain importantly called it, was entirely competent to attend and watch him. She had promised to call them if, in her tactful words, she saw any signs.

  So the Old Gentleman’s daughters and son-in-law waited in the warm living-room, and sipped their cider, and conversed in low, polite tones.

  Mrs. Bain cried a little in pauses in the conversation. She had always cried easily and often. Yet, in spite of her years of practice, she did not do it well. Her eyelids grew pink and sticky, and her nose gave her no little trouble, necessitating almost constant sniffling. She sniffled loudly and conscientiously, and frequently removed her pince-nez to wipe her eyes with a crumpled handkerchief, gray with damp.

  Mrs. Whittaker, too, bore a handkerchief, but she appeared to be ho
lding it in waiting. She was dressed, in compliment to the occasion, in her black crepe de Chine, and she had left her lapis-lazuli pin, her olivine bracelet, and her topaz and amethyst rings at home in her bureau drawer, retaining only her lorgnette on its gold chain, in case there should be any reading to be done.

  Mrs. Whittaker’s dress was always studiously suited to its occasion; thus, her bearing had always that calm that only the correctly attired may enjoy. She was an authority on where to place monograms on linen, how to instruct working folk, and what to say in letters of condolence. The word “lady” figured largely in her conversation. Blood, she often predicted, would tell.

  Mrs. Bain wore a rumpled white shirt-waist and the old blue skirt she saved for “around the kitchen.” There had been time to change, after she had telephoned the doctor’s verdict to her sister, but she had not been quite sure whether it was the thing to do. She had thought that Mrs. Whittaker might expect her to display a little distraught untidiness at a time like this; might even go in for it in a mild way herself.

  Now Mrs. Bain looked at her sister’s elaborately curled, painstakingly brown coiffure, and nervously patted her own straggling hair, gray at the front, with strands of almost lime-color in the little twist at the back. Her eyelids grew wet and sticky again, and she hung her glasses over one forefinger while she applied the damp handkerchief. After all, she reminded herself and the others, it was her poor father.

  Oh, but it was really the best thing, Mrs. Whittaker explained in her gentle, patient voice.

  “You wouldn’t want to see Father go on like this,” she pointed out. Mr. Bain echoed her, as if struck with the idea. Mrs. Bain had nothing to reply to them. No, she wouldn’t want to see the Old Gentleman go on like this.