BOOK ONE THE FAMILY (continued 3)

Mrs. St. Peter went swiftly downstairs to make him a cocktail. She sensed an unusual weariness in him, and felt, as it were, the bitter taste on his tongue. A man, she knew, could get from his daughter a peculiar kind of hurt—one of the cruellest that flesh is heir to. Her heart ached for Godfrey.

When the Professor had been warmed and comforted by a good dinner, he lit a cigar and sat down before the hearth to read. After a while his wife saw that the book had slid to his knee, and he was looking into the fire. Studying his dark profile, she noticed that the corners of his funny eyebrows rose, as if he were amused by something.

“What are you thinking about, Godfrey?” she said presently. “Just then you were smiling—quite agreeably!”

“I was thinking,” he answered absently, “about Euripides; how, when he was an old man, he went and lived in a cave by the sea, and it was thought queer, at the time. It seems that houses had become insupportable to him. I wonder whether it was because he had observed women so closely all his life.”

XV

THE month of March was the dreariest and bleakest of the year in Hamilton, and Louie strove to brighten it by opening a discussion of plans for the summer. He had been hinting for some time that he had a very attractive project up his sleeve, and though he had not succeeded in keeping it from Mrs. St. Peter, he said nothing to the Professor until one night when they were dining at the Marselluses’. All through dinner Louie kept reminding them of the specialties of this and that Paris restaurant, so that St. Peter was not altogether unprepared.

As they left the dining-room, Louie burst out with it. He and Rosamond were to take Doctor and Mrs. St. Peter to France for the summer. Louie had decided upon the dates, the boat, the itinerary; he was intoxicated with the pleasure of planning.

“Understand,” he said, “it is to be our excursion, from Hamilton back to Hamilton. We’ll travel in the most ample comfort, but not in magnificence. We’ll go down to Biarritz for a little fashionable life, and stop at Marseilles to see your foster-brother, Charles Thierault. The rest of the summer we’ll lead a scholarly life in Paris. I have my own reasons for wishing you to go along, Professor. The pleasure of your company would be quite enough, but I have also other reasons. I want to see the intellectual side of Paris, and to meet some of the savants and men of letters whom you know. What a shame Gaston Paris is not living! We could very nicely make up a little party at Lapérouse for him. But there are others.”

Mrs. St. Peter developed the argument. “Yes, Louie, you and Godfrey can lunch with the scholars while Rosamond and I are shopping.”

Marsellus looked alarmed. “Not at all, Dearest! It’s to be understood that I always shop with you. I adore the shops in Paris. Besides, we shall want you with us when we lunch with celebrities. When was a savant, and a Frenchman, not eager for the company of two charming ladies at déjeuner? And you may have too much of the society of your sposi; very nice for you to have variety. You must keep a little engagement book: Lundi, déjeuner, M. Emile Faguet. Mercredi, diner, M. Anatole France; and so on.”

St. Peter chuckled. “I’m afraid you exaggerate the circumference of my social circle, Louie. I haven’t the pleasure of knowing Anatole France.”

“No matter; we can have M. Paul Bourget for Wednesday.”

“You can help us, too, about finding things for the house, Papa,” said Rosamond. “We expect to pick up a good many things. The Thieraults ought to know good shops down in the South, where prices have not gone up.”

“I’m afraid the antiquaries are centralized in Paris. I never saw anything very interesting in Lyons or the Midi. However, they may exist.”

“Charles Thierault is still interested in a shipping-line that runs to the City of Mexico, isn’t he? He could perfectly well send our purchases from Marseilles to the City of Mexico for us. They would go in without duty, and Louie thinks he can get them across the border as household goods.”

“That sounds practicable, Rosie. It might be managed.”

Marsellus laughed and patted his wife’s hand. “Oh-ho, cher Papa, you haven’t begun to find how practical we can be!”

“Well, Louie, it’s a tempting idea, and I’ll think it over. I’ll see whether I can arrange my work.” St. Peter knew at that moment that he would never be one of this light-hearted expedition, and he hated himself for the ungracious drawing-back that he felt in the region of his diaphragm.

The family discussed their summer plans all evening. Louie wanted to write at once for rooms at the Meurice, but Mrs. St. Peter ruled it out as too expensive.

That night, after he was in bed, St. Peter tried in vain to justify himself in his inevitable refusal. He liked Paris, and he liked Louie. But one couldn’t do one’s own things in another person’s way; selfish or not, that was the truth. Besides, he would not be needed. He could trust Louie to take every care of Lillian, and nobody could please her more than her son-in-law. Beaux-fils, apparently, were meant by Providence to take the husband’s place when husbands had ceased to be lovers. Marsellus never forgot one of the hundred foolish little attentions that Lillian loved. Best of all, he admired her extravagantly, her distinction was priceless to him. Many people admired her, but Louie more than most. That worldliness, that willingness to get the most out of occasions and people, which had developed so strongly in Lillian in the last few years, seemed to Louie as natural and proper as it seemed unnatural to Godfrey. It was an element that had always been in Lillian, and as long as it resulted in mere fastidiousness, was not a means to an end, St. Peter had liked it, too. He knew it was due to this worldliness, even more than to the fact that his wife had a little money of her own, that she and his daughters had never been drab and a little pathetic, like some of the faculty women. They hadn’t much, but they were never absurd. They never made shabby compromises. If they couldn’t get the right thing, they went without. Usually they had the right thing, and it got paid for, somehow. He couldn’t say they were extravagant; the old house had been funny and bare enough, but there were no ugly things in it.

Since Rosamond’s marriage to Marsellus, both she and her mother had changed bewilderingly in some respects—changed and hardened. But Louie, who had done the damage, had not damaged himself. It was to him that one appealed,—for Augusta, for Professor Crane, for the bruised feelings of people less fortunate. It was less because of Louie than for any other reason that he would refuse this princely invitation.

He could get out of it without hurting anybody—though he knew Louie would be sorry. He could simply insist that he must work, and that he couldn’t work away from his old study. There were some advantages about being a writer of histories. The desk was a shelter one could hide behind, it was a hole one could creep into.

When St. Peter told his family of his decision, Louie was disappointed; but he was respectful, and readily conceded that the Professor’s first duty was to his work. Rosamond was incredulous and piqued; she didn’t see how he could be so ungenerous as to spoil an arrangement which would give pleasure to everyone concerned. His wife looked at him with thoughtful disbelief.

When they were alone together, she approached the matter more directly than was her wont nowadays.

“Godfrey,” she said slowly and sadly, “I wonder what it is that makes you draw away from your family. Or who it is.”

“My dear, are you going to be jealous?”

“I wish I were going to be. I’d much rather see you foolish about some woman than becoming lonely and inhuman.”

“Well, the habit of living with ideas grows on one, I suppose, just as inevitably as the more cheerful habit of living with various ladies. There’s something to be said for both.”

“I think your ideas were best when you were your most human self.”

St. Peter sighed. “I can’t contradict you there. But I must go on as I can. It is not always May.”

“You are not old enough for the pose you take. That’s what puzzles me. For so many years you never seemed to grow at all older, though I did. Two years ago you were an impetuous young man. Now you save yourself in everything. You’re naturally warm and affectionate; all at once you begin shutting yourself away from everybody. I don’t think you’ll be happier for it.” Up to this point she had been lecturing him. Now she suddenly crossed the room and sat down on the arm of his chair, looking into his face and twisting up the ends of his military eyebrows with her thumb and middle finger. “Why is it, Godfrey? I can’t see any change in your face, though I watch you so closely. It’s in your mind, in your mood. Something has come over you. Is it merely that you know too much, I wonder? Too much to be happy? You were always the wisest person in the world. What is it, can’t you tell me?”

“I can’t altogether tell myself, Lillian. It’s not wholly a matter of the calendar. It’s the feeling that I’ve put a great deal behind me, where I can’t go back to it again—and I don’t really wish to go back. The way would be too long and too fatiguing. Perhaps, for a home-staying man, I’ve lived pretty hard. I wasn’t willing to slight anything—you, or my desk, or my students. And now I seem to be tremendously tired. One pays, coming or going. A man has got only just so much in him; when it’s gone he slumps. Even the first Napoleon did.” They both laughed. That was an old joke—the Professor’s darkest secret. At the font he had been christened Napoleon Godfrey St. Peter. There had always been a Napoleon in the family, since a remote grandfather got his discharge from the Grande Armée. Godfrey had abbreviated his name in Kansas, and even his daughters didn’t know what it had been originally.

“I think, you know,” he told his wife as he rose to go to bed, “that I’ll get my second wind. But for the present I don’t want anything very stimulating. Paris is too beautiful, and too full of memories.”

XVI

ONE Saturday morning in the spring, when the Professor was at work in the old house, he heard energetic footsteps running up the uncarpeted stairway. Louie’s voice called:

“Cher Papa, shall I disturb you too much?”

St. Peter rose and opened to him. Louie was wearing his golf stockings, and a purple jacket with a fur collar.

“No, I’m not going golfing. I changed my mind, but didn’t have time to change my clothes. I want you to take a run out along the lake-shore with us. Rosie is going to lunch with some friends at the Country Club. We’ll have a drive with her, and then drop her there. It’s a glorious day.” Louie’s keen, interested eye ran about the shabby little room. He chuckled. “The old bear, he just likes his old den, doesn’t he? I can readily understand. Your children were born here. Not your daughters—your sons, your splendid Spanish-adventurer sons! I’m proud to be related to them, even by marriage. And your blanket, surely that’s a Spanish touch!” Louie pounced upon the purple blanket, threw it across his chest, and, moving aside the wire lady, studied himself in Augusta’s glass. “And a very proper dressing-gown it would make for Louie, wouldn’t it?”

“It was Outland’s—a precious possession. His lost chum brought it up from Mexico.”

“Was it Outland’s, indeed?” Louie stroked it and regarded it in the glass with increased admiration. “I can never forgive destiny that I hadn’t the chance to know that splendid fellow.”

The Professor’s eyebrows rose in puzzled interrogation. “It might have been awkward—about Rosie, you know.”

“I never think of him as a rival,” said Louie, throwing back the blanket with a wide gesture. “I think of him as a brother, an adored and gifted brother.”

Half an hour later they were spinning along through the country, just coming green, Rosamond and her father on the back seat, Louie facing them. It struck the Professor that Louie had something on his mind; his restless bright eyes watched his wife narrowly, as if to seize an opportune moment.

“You know, Doctor,” he said presently, “we’ve decided to give up our house before we go abroad, and cut off the rent. We’ll move the books and pictures up to Outland (and our wedding presents, of course), and the silver we’ll put in the bank. There won’t be much of our present furniture that we’ll need. I wonder if you could use any of it? And it has just occurred to me, Rosie,” here he leaned forward and tapped her knee, “that we might ask Scott and Kathleen to come round and select anything they like. No use bothering to sell it, we’d get so little.”

Rosamond looked at him in astonishment. It was very evident they had not discussed anything of this sort before. “Don’t be foolish, Louie,” she said quietly. “They wouldn’t want your things.”

“But why not?” he persisted playfully. “They are very nice things. Not right for Outland, but perfectly right for a little house. We chose them with care, and we don’t want them going into some dirty second-hand shop.”

“They won’t have to. We can store them in the attic at Outland, Heaven knows it’s big enough! You don’t have to do anything with them just now.”

“It seems a pity, when somebody might be getting the good of them. I know Scott could do very well with that chiffonier of mine. He admired it greatly, I remember, and said he’d never had one with proper drawers for his shirts.”

Rosamond’s lip curled.

“Don’t look like that, Rosie! It’s naughty. Stop it!” Louie reached forward and shook her gently by the elbows. “And how can you be sure the McGregors wouldn’t like our things, when you’ve never asked them? What positive ideas she does get into her head!”

“They wouldn’t want them because they are ours, yours and mine, if you will have it,” she said coldly, drawing away from him.

Louie sank back into his seat and gave it up. “Why do you think such naughty things? I don’t believe it, you know! You are so touchy. Scott and Kitty may be a little stand-offish, but it might very possibly make them feel better if you went at them nicely about this.” He rallied and began to coax again. “She’s got it into her head that the McGregors have a grudge, Doctor. There’s nothing to it.”

Rosamond had grown quite pale. Her upper lip, that was so like her mother’s when she was affable, so much harder when she was not, came down like a steel curtain. “I happen to know, Louie, that Scott blackballed you for the Arts and Letters. You can call that a grudge or not, as you please.”

Marsellus was visibly shaken. He looked sad. “Well, if he did, it wasn’t very nice of him, certainly. But are you sure, Rosie? Rumours do go about, and people like to stir up family differences.”

“It isn’t people, and it’s not rumour. I know it positively. Kathleen’s best friend told me.”

Louie lay back and shook with laughter. “Oh, the ladies, the ladies! What they do to each other, Professor!”

St. Peter was very uncomfortable. “I don’t think I’d accept such evidence, Rosamond. I don’t believe it of Scott, and I think Louie has the right idea. People are like children, and Scott’s poor and proud. I think Louie’s chiffonier would go to his heart, if Louie offered it to him. I’m afraid you wouldn’t do it very graciously.”

“Professor, I’ll go to McGregor’s office and put it up to him. If he scorns it, so much the worse for him. He’ll lose a very handy piece of furniture.”

Rosamond’s paleness changed to red. Fortunately they were spinning over the gravel loops that led through shaven turf to the Country Club. “You can do as you like with your own things, Louie. But I don’t want any of mine in the McGregors’ bungalow. I know Scott’s brand of humour too well, and the kind of jokes that would be made about them.”

The car stopped. Louie sprang out and gave his arm to his wife. He walked up the steps to the door with her, and his back expressed such patient, protecting kindness that the Professor bit his lower lip with indignation. Louie came back looking quite grey and tired, and sank into the seat beside the Professor with a sadder-and-wiser smile.

“Louie,” St. Peter spoke with deep feeling, “do you happen to have read a novel of Henry James, The American? There’s a rather nice scene in it, in which a young Frenchman, hurt in a duel, apologizes for the behaviour of his family. I’d like to do something of the sort. I apologize to you for Rosamond, and for Scott, if he has done such a mean thing.”

Louie’s downcast face brightened at once. He squeezed the Professor’s arm warmly. “Oh, that’s all right, sir! As for Scott, I can understand. He was the first son of the family, and he was the whole thing. Then I came along, a stranger, and carried off Rosie, and this patent began to pay so well—it’s enough to make any man jealous, and he a Scotchman! But I think Scott will come around in the end; people usually do, if you treat them well, and I mean to. I like the fellow. As for Rosamond, you mustn’t give that a thought. I love her when she’s naughty. She’s a bit unreasonable sometimes, but I’m always hoping for a period of utter, of fantastic unreasonableness, which will be the beginning of a great happiness for us all.”

“Louie, you are magnanimous and magnificent!” murmured his vanquished father-in-law.

XVII

LILLIAN and the Marselluses sailed for France early in May. The Professor, left alone, had plenty of time to spray his rose-vines, and his garden had never been so beautiful as it was that June. After his university duties were over, he smuggled his bed and clothing back to the old house and settled down to a leisurely bachelor life. He realized that he ought to be getting to work. The garden, in which he sat all day, was no longer a valid excuse to keep him from his study. But the task that awaited him up there was difficult. It was a little thing, but one of those little things at which the hand becomes self-conscious, feels itself stiff and clumsy.

It was his plan to give part of this summer to Tom Outland’s diary—to edit and annotate it for publication. The bother was that he must write an introduction. The diary covered only about six months of the boy’s life, a summer he spent on the Blue Mesa, and in it there was almost nothing about Tom himself. To mean anything, it must be prefaced by a sketch of Outland, and some account of his later life and achievements. To write of his scientific work would be comparatively easy. But that was not all the story; his was a many-sided mind, though a simple and straightforward personality.

Of course Mrs. St. Peter had insisted that he was not altogether straightforward; but that was merely because he was not altogether consistent. As an investigator he was clear-sighted and hard-headed; but in personal relations he was apt to be exaggerated and quixotic. He idealized the people he loved and paid his devoir to the ideal rather than to the individual, so that his behaviour was sometimes a little too exalted for the circumstances—“chivalry of the cinema,” Lillian used to say. One of his sentimental superstitions was that he must never on any account owe any material advantage to his friends, that he must keep affection and advancement far apart, as if they were chemicals that would disintegrate each other. St. Peter thought this the logical result of Tom’s strange bringing-up and his early associations. There is, he knew, this dream of self-sacrificing friendship and disinterested love down among the day-labourers, the men who run the railroad trains and boats and reapers and thrashers and mine-drills of the world. And Tom had brought it along to the university, where advancement through personal influence was considered honourable.

It was not until Outland was a senior that Lillian began to be jealous of him. He had been almost a member of the family for two years, and she had never found fault with the boy. But after the Professor began to take Tom up to the study and talk over his work with him, began to make a companion of him, then Mrs. St. Peter withdrew her favour. She could change like that; friendship was not a matter of habit with her. And when she was through with anyone, she of course found reasons for her fickleness. Tom, she reminded her husband, Was far from frank, though he had such an open manner. He had been consistently reserved about his own affairs, and she could not believe the facts he withheld were altogether creditable. They had always known he had a secret, something to do with the mysterious Rodney Blake and the bank account in New Mexico upon which he was not at liberty to draw. The young man must have felt the change in her, for he began that winter to make his work a pretext for coming to the house less often. He and St. Peter now met in the alcove behind the Professor’s lecture room at the university.

One Sunday, shortly before Tom’s Commencement, he came to the house to ask Rosamond to go to the senior dance with him. The family were having tea in the garden; a few days of intensely warm weather had come on and hurried the roses into bloom. Rosamond happened to ask Tom, who sat in his white flannels, fanning himself with his straw hat, if spring in the South-west was as warm as this.

“Oh, no,” he replied. “May is usually chilly down there—bright sun, but a kind of edge in the wind, and cool nights. Last night reminded me of smothery May nights in Washington.”

Mrs. St. Peter glanced up. “You mean Washington City? I didn’t know you had ever been so far east.”

There was no denying that the young man looked uncomfortable. He frowned and said in a low voice: “Yes, I’ve been there. I suppose I don’t speak of it because I haven’t very pleasant recollections of it.”

“How long were you there?” his hostess asked.

“A winter and spring, more than six months. Long enough to get very home-sick.” He went away almost at once, as if he were afraid of being questioned further.

The subject came up again a few weeks later, however. After Tom’s graduation, two courses were open to him. He was offered an instructorship, with a small salary, in the Physics department under Dr. Crane, and a graduate scholarship at Johns Hopkins University. St. Peter strongly urged him to accept the latter. One evening when the family were discussing Tom’s prospects, the Professor summed up all the reasons why he ought to go to Baltimore and work in the laboratory made famous by Dr. Rowland. He assured him, moreover, that he would find the atmosphere of an old Southern city delightful.

“Yes, I know something about the atmosphere,” Tom broke out at last. “It is delightful, but it’s all wrong for me. It discourages me dreadfully. I used to go over there when I was in Washington, and it always made me blue. I don’t believe I could ever work there.”

“But can you trust a child’s impressions to guide you now, in such an important decision?” asked Mrs. St. Peter gravely.

“I wasn’t a child, Mrs. St. Peter. I was as much grown up as I am now—older, in some ways. It was only about a year before I came here.”

“But, Tom, you were on the section gang that year! Why do you mix us all up?” Kathleen caught his hand and squeezed the knuckles together, as she did when she wanted to punish him.

“Well, maybe it was two years before. It doesn’t matter. It was long enough to count for two ordinary years,” he muttered abstractedly.

Again he went away abruptly, and a few days later he told St. Peter that he had definitely accepted the instructorship under Crane, and would stay on in Hamilton.

During that summer after Outland’s graduation, St. Peter got to know all there was behind his reserve. Mrs. St. Peter and the two girls were in Colorado, and the Professor was alone in the house, writing on volumes three and four of his history. Tom was carrying on some experiments of his own, over in the Physics laboratory. He and St. Peter were often together in the evening, and on fine afternoons they went swimming. Every Saturday the Professor turned his house over to the cleaning-woman, and he and Tom went to the lake and spent the day in his sail-boat.

It was just the sort of summer St. Peter liked, if he had to be in Hamilton at all. He was his own cook, and had laid in a choice assortment of cheeses and light Italian wines from a discriminating importer in Chicago. Every morning before he sat down at his desk he took a walk to the market and had his pick of the fruits and salads. He dined at eight o’clock. When he cooked a fine leg of lamb, saignant, well rubbed with garlic before it went into the pan, then he asked Outland to dinner. Over a dish of steaming asparagus, swathed in a napkin to keep it hot, and a bottle of sparkling Asti, they talked and watched night fall in the garden. If the evening happened to be rainy or chilly, they sat inside and read Lucretius.

It was on one of those rainy nights, before the fire in the dining-room, that Tom at last told the story he had always kept back. It was nothing very incriminating, nothing very remarkable; a story of youthful defeat, the sort of thing a boy is sensitive about—until he grows older.