The Lovely Lady

"They don't. Did you see Ada Harvey to-day? Four children and two teeth out, and her not thirty. I guess you'd take better care of me than that, Peter,—only–"

"You think she wouldn't like it for you?"

"She thought such a lot of keeping up a home, Peter. It was like—like those Catholics burning candles. It seemed as if she thought you'd get something out of it if it was just going on, even if you didn't visit it more than two or three times a year. Lots of women feel that way, Peter, and I guess there must be something in it."

"There is something in it," Peter assured her.

"And if I go and board with you we'd have to break up everything–" She looked about on all the familiar mould of daily habit that was her world, and tears started afresh. "And we've got all this furniture." She moved her head toward the door of the front room and the parlour set that had been Peter's Christmas gift to them two years ago. "For all it was such a comfort to her to have it, it's as good as new. It seemed as if she thought you were the only one good enough to sit in it."

"Don't, Ellen."

"I know, Peter." They were silent a while until the deep wells of grief had stilled in the sense of that sustaining presence. "I only wanted to be sure I wouldn't be going against her, breaking up the home. It seems like anything she set such store by oughtn't to stop just because she isn't here to take care of it." They had to come back to that the next day and the next.

"I only want to do what is best for you, Ellen."

"I'd be best off if I was making you happy, Peter—and I'd feel such a burden somehow, just boarding."

"The rents are cheaper in the suburbs," Peter went so far as to admit. It was all so inarticulate in him; how could he explain to Ellen the feeling that he had, that settling down to a home with her would somehow put an end to any dreams he had had of a home of his own, persistent but unshaped visions that vanished before the sudden brightening of Ellen's face at his least concession.

"We could have somebody in to clean," she reminded him, "and I hardly ever have to be in bed now."

The fact was that Peter had the very place in mind; he had often walked out there on Sundays from Blodgett's; he thought the neighbourhood had a clean and healthy look. He went up on Tuesday to see what could be done about it.

Lessing, who rented him the apartment, made the natural mistake about it that Peter's age and his inexperience as a householder invited. He said the neighbours were all a most desirable class of people, and Peter could see for himself that the city was bound to build out that way in a few years. As for what Pleasanton could do in the way of climate, well, Lessing told him, with the air of being only a little less interested than he credited Peter with being, look at the perambulators.

They were as fine a lot of wellfilled vehicles as could be produced by any suburb anywhere, and Ellen for one was never tired of looking at them. But Peter couldn't understand why Ellen insisted on walking home from church Sunday morning the wrong way of the pavement.

"I suppose we do get in the way," she admitted after he had explained to her that they wouldn't be crowded off so frequently if they moved with the nurse-maid's parade and not against it, "but if we go this way we can see all the little faces."

"I didn't know you cared so much for babies."

"Well, you see it isn't as if I was to have any of my own–" Something in the tone with which she admitted the restraining fact of her affliction brought out for Peter how she had fitted her life to it, like a plant growing hardily out of a rock, climbing over and around it without rancour or rebellion. As he turned now to look at her long, plain face in the light of what had been going on in himself lately, he recalled that the determining influence which had drawn her thick hair into that unbecoming knot at the back of her neck had been the pain it had given her when she first began to put up her hair, to do it higher.

She was watching the bright little bonneted heads go by with the same detachment that he had learned to look at the shop windows, without thinking of appropriating any of their splendour for himself, and when she spoke again it was without any sensible connection with the present occasion.

"Peter, do you remember Willy Shakeley?"

"Shakey Willy, we used to call him. I remember his freckles; they were the biggest thing about him." He waited for the communicating thread, but nothing came except what presently reached him out of his own young recollections. "He wasn't good enough for you, Ellen," he said at last for all comment.

"He was kind, and he wouldn't have minded about my being lame, but a man has to have a healthy wife if he's a farmer." How completely she had accepted the deprivation for herself, he saw by her not wasting a sigh over it; she had schooled herself so long to go no further in her thought than she went on the crutch which tapped now on the pavement beside him. As if to stop his going any further on her account she smiled up at him. "Peter, if you were to meet any of the things you thought you'd grow up to be, do you suppose you'd know them?"

At least he could have told her that he didn't meet any of them on his way between Siegel Brothers and the flat in Pleasanton.

There are many things which if a young man goes without until he is twenty-five he can very well do without, but the one thing he cannot leave off without hurting him is the expectation of some time doing them. The obligation of the mortgage and Ellen's lameness had been a sort of bridge for Peter, a high airy structure which engaged the best of him and so carried him safely over Blodgett's without once letting him fall into the unlovely vein of life there, its narrowness, its commonness. He had known, even when he had known it most inaccessible, that there was another life which answered to every instinct of his for beauty and fitness. He waited only for the release from strain for his entry with it. Now by the shock of his mother's death he found himself precipitated in a frame of living where a parlour set out of Siegel Brothers' Household Emporium was the limit of taste and understanding. The worst thing about Siegel Brothers' parlour sets was that he sold them. He knew it was his particular value to Siegel Brothers that he had always known what sort of things were acceptable to the out-of-town trade. He had selected this one distinctly with an eye to the pleasure his mother and Ellen would get out of what Bloombury would think of it. He hadn't expected it would turn and rend him. That it was distinctly better than anything he had had at Blodgett's was inconsiderable beside the fact that Blodgett's hadn't owned him. That he was owned now by his sister and the furniture, was plain to him the first time he sat down to figure out the difference between his salary and what it would cost him to let Ellen be a burden to him in the way that made her happiest. Not that he thought of Ellen in that way; he was glad when he thought of it at all articulately, to be able to make life so little of a burden to her. But though he saw quite clearly how, without some fortunate accident, the rest of his life would be taken up with making a home for Ellen and making it secure for her in case anything happened to him, he saw too, that there was no room in it for the Lovely Lady. The worst of all this was that he did not see how he was to go on without her.

He had fled to her from the inadequacy of all substitutes for her that his life afforded, and she had ended by making him over into the sort of man who could never be satisfied with anything less. Something he owed, no doubt, to that trait of his father's which made his memories of Italy more to him than his inheritance, but there it was, a world Peter had built up out of books and pictures and music, more real and habitable than that in which he went about in a gray business suit and a pleasant ready manner; a world from which, every time he fitted his key in the latch of the little flat in Pleasanton, he felt himself suddenly dispossessed.

It was not that he failed to get a proper pleasure out of being a householder, in being able to take a certain tone with the butcher and discuss water rates and rents with other householders going to and fro on his train. Ellen's cooking tasted good to him and it was very pleasant to see the pleasure it gave her to have Burnell of the hardware, out to supper occasionally. He made friends with Lessing, whose natty and determinedly architectural office with its air of being somehow akin to Wally Whitaker, occupied the corner where Peter waited every morning for his car. Lessing began it by coming out on the very first occasion to ask him how his sister did, in an effort to correct any impression of a want of perspicuity in his first estimate of Peter's situation. He kept it up for the reason perhaps that men friends are meant for each other from the beginning of time quite as much as we are accustomed to thinking of them as being meant for the lovely ladies whom they so frequently miss. Lessing was about Peter's own age and had large and cheerful notions of the probable increase of real-estate values in Pleasanton, combined with a just appreciation of the simple shrewdness which had so recommended Peter to his employers.

"You'd be a crackerjack to talk to the old ladies," Lessing generously praised him. "I scare 'em; they think I'm too hopeful." That he didn't, however, have the same effect on young ladies was apparent from the very pretty one whom Peter used to see about, especially on early closing Saturday afternoons, helping him to shut up the office and get off to the ball game. He couldn't have told why, but those were the days when Peter allowed the car to carry him on to the next block, before alighting, after which he would make a point of being particularly kind to Ellen. It would never do for her to get a notion that the tapping of her crutch beside him had scared anything out of Peter's life which he might think worth having in it.

Along toward Thanksgiving time, on an occasion when Peter had just missed his car and had to wait for another one, Lessing—J. B. on the door sign, though he was the sort that everybody who knew him called Julian—came quite out to the pavement and stood there with his hands in his pockets and his hair beginning to curl boyishly in the dampness, quite brimming over with good fortune. Singularly he didn't mention it at once, but began to complain about the low state of the market in real estate.

"Not but that the values are all right," he was careful to explain; "it's just that they are all right makes it so trying. If a fellow had a little capital now, he could do wonders. The deuce of a chap like me is that he hasn't any capital unless there's some buying."

"You think it's a good time then to lay out a little money?"

"Good! Good! Oh, Lord, it's so good that if a fellow had a few thousands just put around judiciously, he wouldn't be able to sleep nights for hearing it turn over." He kicked the gravel in sheer impatience. "How's your sister?"

It was a formula that he had kept on with because to have dropped it immediately might have betrayed the extenuating nature of its inception, and besides there were so many directions in which one might start conversationally off from it. He made use of it now without waiting for Peter's habitual "Very well, thank you," by a burst into confidence.

"You see I'm engaged to be married—yes, I guess you've seen me with her. Fact is, I haven't cared how much people have seen so long as she's seen it, too; and now we've got it all fixed up, naturally I'm on the make. I'm dashed if I don't think I'll have to take a partner."

"I've been wanting to speak to you about some property of mine," Peter ventured. "It's a farm up country."

"What's it worth?"

"Well, I've added to it some the last ten years and made considerable improvement. I ought to get three thousand."

"That's for farming? For summer residence it ought to bring more than that. Any scenery?"

"Plenty," Peter satisfied him on that score. "I've been thinking," he let out shyly, "that if I could put the price of it in some place where I could watch it, the money would do me more good...."

Lessing turned on him a suddenly brightening eye.

"That's the talk—say, you know I think I could get you forty-five hundred for that farm of yours anyway." They looked at one another on the verge of things hopeful and considerable. As Peter's car swung around the curve, suddenly they blushed, both of them, and reached out and shook hands.

That evening as Peter came home he saw Lessing buying chrysanthemums at the florist's with a happy countenance, and to master the queer pang it gave him, Peter got off the car and walked a long way out on the dim wet pavement. He was looking at the bright picture of Lessing and the girl—she was really very pretty—and seeing instead, himself, quite the bachelor, and his lame sister taking their blameless dull way in the world. He couldn't any more for the life of him, get a picture of himself without Ellen in it; the tapping of her crutch sounded even in the House when he visited it in his dreams. It was well on this occasion that he had Ellen beside him, for she showed him the way presently to take it, as he knew she would take it as soon as he went home and told her—as another door by which they could enter sympathetically in the joyousness they were denied. She would be so pleased for Julian's sake, in whom, by Peter's account of him, she took the greatest interest, and so pleased for the girl to have such a handsome, capable lover. It made, for Ellen, a better thing of life if somebody could have him.

Peter went back after a while with that thought to the florist's and bought chrysanthemums, taking care to ask for the same kind Mr. Lessing had just ordered. He was feeling quite cheerful even, as he ran up the steps with them a few minutes later, and saw the square of light under the half-drawn curtain, and heard the tap of Ellen's crutch coming to meet him.

That night after he had gone to bed a very singular thing happened. The Princess out of the picture visited him. It was there at the foot of his bed in a new frame where Ellen had hung it—the young knight riding down the old, lumpy dragon, but with an air that Peter hadn't for a long time been able to manage for himself, doing a great thing easily the way one knew perfectly great things couldn't. The assistant sales manager of Siegel Brothers had been lying staring up at it for some time when the Princess spoke to him. He knew it was she, though there was no face nor form that he could remember in his waking hours, except that it was familiar.

"Ellen is right," she told him; "it doesn't really matter so long as somebody finds me."

"But what have I done?" Peter was sore with a sense of personal slight. "It wasn't in the story that there should be a whole crop of dragons."

"All dragons are made so that where one head comes off there are seven in its place; and you must remember if somebody didn't go about slaying them, I couldn't be at all." This as she said it had a deep meaning for Peter that afterward escaped him. "And you can hold the dream. It takes a lot of dreaming to bring one like me to pass."

"I'm sick of dreams," said Peter. "A man dies after a little who is fed on nothing else."

"They die quicker if they stop dreaming; on those that have the gift for it the business of dreaming falls. Listen! How many that you know have found me?"

"A great many think they have; it comes to the same thing."

"The same for them; but you must see that I can never really be until I am for those outside the dream. The trouble with you is that you'd wake up after a while and you would know."

"Yes," Peter admitted, "I should know."

"Well, then," she was oh, so gentle about it, "yours is the better part. If you can't have me, at least you're not stopping me by leaving off for something else. In the dream I can live and grow, and you can grow to me. Do you remember what happened to Ada Harvey? I've saved you from that at any rate."

"No," said Peter, "it was the dragon saved me. I thought you were she. It's saved me from lots of things, now that I think of it."

"Ah, that's what we have to do between us, Peter, we have to save you. You're worth saving."

"Save me for what?" Peter cried out to her and so strongly in his loneliness that he found himself starting up from his bed with it. He could see the dragon spitting flames as before, and the pale light from the swinging street lamp gilding the frame of the picture. Though he did not understand all that had happened to him, as he lay down again he was more comforted than he had been at any time since he had made up his mind that he was to be a bachelor.

PART FOUR

IN WHICH THE LOVELY LADY MAKES A
FINAL APPEARANCE

I

On the day that the silver-laced maple, then in fullest leaf, had passed by the space of three delicate palm-shaped banners the sill of the third-story office window, Lessing, of Weatheral, Lessing & Co., Brokers in Real Estate, crossed over to his partner's desk before sitting down at his own, and remained quietly leaning against it and looking out of the window without a word. He remained there staring out over the new, orderly growth of the suburb, toward the river, until the stenographer from the outer room had come in with the vase which she had been filling with great golden roses, and gone out again, after placing it carefully in the exact middle of the top of the junior partner's desk. By that time Lessing's rather plump, practical hand had crept out along the rim of the desk until it was covered by Peter's lean one, and still neither of them had said a word. The roses had come in from Lessing's country place that morning in Lessing's car, and Lessing's wife had gathered them. There were exactly seventeen, full-blown and fragrant, and one small bud of promise which Peter presently removed from its vase to his button hole. The act had almost the significance of a ritual, a thing done many times with particular meaning.

"Somehow," Peter said as he fastened it with a pin underneath his lapel, "seventeen years seems a shorter time to look back on than to look forward to."

"Well, when we've put twenty-five years of work into it—and that's nothing to what we'll get into the next seventeen." Lessing's tone keyed admirably with the bright ample day outside, the rapid glint of the river and the tips of the maple all a-tremble with the urgency of new growth. The senior partner's eye roved from that to the restrained richness of the office furniture from which the new was not yet worn, and returned to the contemplation of the towering white cumuli beginning to pile up beyond the farther bank of the river. "There's no end to what a man can lift," he asserted confidently, "once he's got his feet under him."

"We've carried a lot," Peter assented cheerfully, "and sometimes it was rather steep going, but now it's carrying us. The question is"—and here his voice fell off a shade and a slight gathering appeared between his eyes—"the real question is, I suppose, what it is carrying us to."

"Where's the good of that?" Julian protested. "It's only a limitation to set out for a particular place. The fun is in the going. You keep right along with the procession until old age gets you. The thing is just to keep it up as long as you can." He swung himself into a sitting posture on the edge of the desk and noted that the slight pucker had not left his partner's eyes. "What's the idea?" he wished affectionately to know.

"Oh, nothing much, but I sort of grew up with the idea of Duty—something you had to do because there was nobody else to do it. You had not only to do it but you had to like it, not because it was likable, but because it was your duty. It was always right in front of me: I couldn't see over or around it; I just had to do it."

"Well, you did it," Lessing corroborated. "Clarice says the way you've taken care of Ellen–"

"And the way Ellen has taken care of me—but then Ellen was all the woman I had." He caught himself up swiftly after that; it was seldom even to his partner that anything escaped him in reference to the interior life of dreams which had gone on in him, quite happily behind his undistinguished exterior. "But somehow it hasn't seemed to come out anywhere. I've done my duty … and when I'm dead and Ellen's dead, where is it? After all, what have I done?"

"Ah, look at Pleasanton," Julian reminded him; "do you call that nothing?" They looked together toward the esplanade along the river, beginning at this hour to be flecked with the white aprons of nurse-maids and their charges. "We've given them clean water to drink and clean streets, and a safe place for the children to play in. The fight we had with the city council for that …!" He waved his arm again toward the well-parked river front. "Ever since I sold your farm for you and you began putting your money into the business, we've walked right along with it. Even before you left Siegel Brothers and we used to sit up nights with the map, planning where to put our money like a checker-board, we saw things like this for the town, and now we've made 'em true. And you say we've done nothing!" The senior partner was touched a little in his tenderest susceptibilities.

"Oh, well," Peter admitted with a shamed laugh, "I suppose man is an incurable egotist. I was thinking of something more personal, something mine, the way a book or a picture belongs to the man who makes it."

"The game isn't over yet," Lessing reminded him, with a glance at the unfolding bud which Clarice had sent as a symbol of the opening year; "you're only forty. And, anyway, the money's yours; you made it." Something in the word recalled him to a thought that had been earlier in his mind. "Clarice wanted me to ask you to-day if you had any idea how much you are worth."

Peter's attention came back from the window with a start. "Does that mean the Fresh Air Fund or the Association for the Protection of Ownerless Pups?"

Julian grinned. "Ownerless bachelors rather. Clarice has an idea you are well enough off to marry."

"If it were a proposition of my being married to Clarice I should consider myself well enough off without anything else–" Peter dropped the light, accustomed banter for a sober tone. "How well off does your wife think I ought to be?"

"She's got it figured out that all you've spent on making Ellen comfortable for life isn't a patch on what she and the boys cost me, so it's high time you set about your natural destiny of making some woman happy."

"Look here, Julian, is it an object for a man to live for, making some woman happy?"

"Well, it keeps you on the jump all right," Lessing assured him. "What else is there? It's a way of making yourself happy when you come to look at it; keeping her and the kids so that you leave the world better off than you found it. It suits me." He was looking, indeed, particularly well suited, in spite of a disposition to portliness and a suspicion of thinning hair, with what the seventeen years just past had brought him. A warm appreciation of what those things were touched his regard for his companion with a sober affectionateness. "I reckon Clarice is right: a wife and a couple of kids is the prescription for your case. That's why she wanted me to remind you that you could afford 'em."

"And has she named the day?" Peter wished to know whimsically.

"Oh, I say, Weatheral–"

"My dear Julian, if I hadn't been able to see what Clarice has been up to for the last six months, at least I could have depended on Ellen to see it for me."

"She doesn't object, does she?"

"Oh, if you think the privilege of being aunt to your children has made up to her for not being aunt to mine–"

"The privilege is on the other side. But anyway, I'm glad you got on to it. I didn't want to be a spoil sport. I suppose women's instincts can be trusted in these things, but I hated to see Clarice coming it over you blind."

Peter wondered to himself a little, which of the charming ladies to whom he had been introduced lately, Clarice had selected for him. He wasn't, however, concerned about her coming it blind over anybody but the senior partner who got down now from the desk, whistling softly and walking with a wide step as a man will in June when affairs go well with him, and he feels that if there are still some things which he desires he is able to get them for himself.

"Don't forget you're coming to us on Saturday; and we dine together to-night as usual."

"As usual." Always on the anniversary of their beginning business together Weatheral and Lessing, who were still, in spite of seeing one another daily for seventeen years, able to be interested in one another, dined apart from their families, savouring pleasantly that essential essence of maleness, the mutual power of work well accomplished. It was the best tribute that Clarice and Ellen could pay to the occasion that they understood that, much as their several lives had profited by the partnership, they were still and naturally outside of it.

On this occasion, however, it was impossible for Peter to keep Mrs. Lessing out of the background of his consciousness, because of the part her suggestion of the morning played in new realization of himself as the rich Mr. Weatheral of Pleasanton. He credited her with sufficient knowledge of his character to have egged Julian on to the reminder as a part of the game she had played with him for the past two or three years, by which Peter was to be instated in a life more in keeping with his opportunities.

It was a game Clarice played with life everywhere, coaxing it to yield its choicest bloom to her. She had an instinct for choiceness like a hummingbird, darting here and there for sweetness. Her flutterings were never of uncertainty but such as kept her in the perfect airy poise. If she wanted marriage for Peter it was because she could imagine nothing better for anybody than a marriage like hers, and if she chose this time for letting him know that she was thinking of it, it was because in those terms she could bring closest to him his new-found possibilities. If she could have reached Peter with the personal certainty of riches by explaining to him how far his dollars would stretch end to end, or how many acres of postage stamps he could buy with them, she might have thought less of him on that account, but she would have helped him to understanding even on those terms. You couldn't have made Clarice Lessing believe that whatever their limitations, people weren't entitled to help simply because they needed it.

It had come upon Peter by leaps and bounds during the last two or three years, both the wealth and the necessity of putting it to himself in terms of personal expression. During the first ten years of the partnership, the only use for money the simple needs of Ellen and himself had established was to put it back into the business; a use which had become almost an obligation during the time when both children and opportunity were coming to Julian faster than the cash to meet them. It was due to the high ground that Clarice had made for them all out of what she and the children stood for, that Peter's superior cash contribution to the firm had become a privilege. They had had, he and Ellen, their stringent occasions; it had been Clarice's part to see that since they endured the pinch of poverty they should at least get something human out of it. It came out for Peter pleasantly as he walked home through the mild June evening, just how much they had had. Much, much more than they would have been able to buy with the money they might in strict equity have withdrawn from the business. Nothing, he had long admitted, that he could have purchased for his sister would have been so satisfying as what Clarice contributed, pressing the full cup of her motherhood to Ellen's thirsty lips. They might have grown sleek, he and Ellen, without exceeding a proper ratio of expenditure, and if in the end they had been a little less rich, they would still have had enough to go on being sleek and comfortable to the end. That he was still fit, as Mrs. Lessing's transparent efforts to marry him to her friends guaranteed him to be, he felt was owing greatly to the terms on which Clarice had admitted him to the adventure of bringing up a family. That a special fitness was required for admission to Mrs. Lessing's circle he would have guessed even without the aid of print which consistently described it as Our Best Society, for it was a Best attested to by all the marks by which Clarice herself expressed the essential fineness of things.

One couldn't have told, from anything that appeared on the surface of the Lessing's social environment, that life did not proceed there as it did between Clarice and the Weatherals, by means of its subtler sympathies, and proceed, at least so far as the women were concerned, on a still higher plane of grace and harmony. It moved about her table and across the lawns of Lessing's handsome country place, with such soundless ease and perfection as it had glided for Peter through the House with the Shining Walls. Or at least so it had seemed on those occasions during the last few years when he had found himself wondrously inside it.

It had been accepted by Ellen on the mere certainty of Clarice's mother having been one of the Thatcher Inwoods, that Clarice should enlarge her social borders with Lessing's increasing means until they included people among whom Ellen would have been miserably shy and out of tune. But not Ellen herself guessed how much of Peter's admission to its inaccessibility was owing to the returns from hardly snatched options and long-nursed opportunities, coming in in checks of six figures. Perhaps Clarice herself never knew. It was one of the things that went with being a Thatcher Inwood, wherever an occasion presented a handle of nobility, to seize by that and maintain it in the face of any contingent smallness. Clarice wouldn't have introduced Peter to her friends if he hadn't been fit, and it was part of the social creed of women like Clarice Lessing, which takes almost the authority of religion, that he wouldn't have been in a position to be introduced if he hadn't been fit. So it had happened for the past two years that Peter had found himself skirting the fringe of Best Society, and identifying it with the life he had lived so long, sitting with his book open on his knees in their little flat, with Ellen across the fire from him knitting white things for Julian's children. But the idea that having come into this neighbourhood of fine appreciations he was to take up his home and live there, opened more slowly. It required more than one of Clarice's swift hummingbird darts, more than the flutter of suggestion to brush its petals awake for him.