§ ii
They went, one or the other of them, to meet all the reasonable trains.
“Why not?” said Andrée. “For mercy’s sake, what else have we to do?”
But he did not come by any of them. As a sort of punishment for his shocking lack of industry during his late year at the Polytechnic Institute, he had been banished to a solitary camp in Maine with Lance, selected as a tutor of the most serious possible sort. And as Lance—who was perfectly indifferent to the boy’s moral defects—wrote encouragingly of his mental attainments, he was allowed a two weeks’ visit to his mother and sisters.
When he didn’t come by the five o’clock train, they gave him up for that day. They were all dressed with an eye to his acutely critical taste, and a little crestfallen at their unregarded condition. They came down onto the veranda to wait until the bell rang for dinner, and sat there patiently with the old ladies.... When there came, along the mountain road, a terrific roaring, a dense cloud of dust, and a motor-car came up at a hair-raising speed, an eccentric, purple car, very low, with a gigantic engine. From this affair sprang out a figure in a duster, wearing goggles and a plaid cap put on backward.
They all started up, joyfully, and Andrée rushed to meet him.
“Where did you get that thing?” she cried.
“It’s Pendleton’s. What do you think of it? It’s a French car.”
“It’s très chic. Come and see Mother!”
He sprang up the steps, pulled off cap and goggles, and kissed Claudine. And try as she would, she couldn’t help looking at him indulgently, instead of wisely. There was something about him.... He was a very slight boy, barely eighteen, with an unusually dark skin and sleek black hair; he had a trick of keeping his mouth open, which showed his brilliantly white teeth, and gave him a stupid air; he had a smooth, oval face, narrow eyes, a rather weak chin; he looked at first glance like a silly young ass. But after you had looked again you were more inclined to think him a most engaging young devil. He had an odd, sidelong glance and a grimace of gamin impudence; he was never bad-tempered or sullen, but sometimes a little malicious.
“How did you get on with Cousin Lance, my dear?” asked his mother.
“Splendidly!” he answered. “Aren’t you pretty, Mammy! But a bit spindly. Why don’t you drink ale?”
“I’m very well, Bertie. Why did you take Mr. Pendleton’s car? Isn’t it rather a risk?”
“His look out. He offered it. He’s a nice little playmate. He took me out to dinner the first night I got home, because the old man said he was busy. Some dinner! Andrée, what is there to do here?”
“Lots! You can knit and embroider and play solitaire—”
“We’ll change all that, don’t worry! Here’s the latest thing in evolution, as old Lance would say, come to put a little pep into the fossils. Mammy, don’t you think I’ve evoluted a whole lot further than Father? Lance says it takes two million years to grow a new toe, or lose one, I forget which, but it seems to me—”
“That’s the dinner bell,” said Edna. “Come in just as you are. No one dresses here.”
“Noblesse oblige!” said Bertie. “I’m going to dress. Tell them to keep the kettle on the hob—whatever that is—for a few minutes.”
He came down again very promptly, with his black head sleek as a seal, and a new and marvelous dark suit. He disdained all the various washable materials; they were “a mess,” he said, no one had any business to be hot enough to want them. He was absolutely correct in every detail, a very model of fashion and deportment; how were they not to be proud of him and delighted with him? He was very attentive to his mother, and even if it were a rather ostentatious courtesy, it warmed her heart.
She grew annoyed, though, when he persisted in smoking cigarettes between courses.
“It’s very bad manners,” she said. “It’s disrespectful to me and your sisters. And what’s more, no one smokes here in the dining-room. It isn’t a hotel.”
“I’ll teach it to be. And it’s not disrespectful, dear creatures. It’s simply being done now.”
“And you’re too young to smoke. It’s very harmful at your age. I can’t bear to see you, Bertie!”
“Mammy, don’t spoil my poor little holiday! Two weeks—that’s all! Up there with old Lance, I neither smoke, chew, drink, spit nor cuss. Let me have my brief day!”
When they went out onto the veranda after dinner, his quick ear caught the sound of distant music.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Dancing down at the hotel,” answered Edna.
“Free for all, and leave your guns at the door?” he asked.
And after this, nothing would do, but that they must all stroll down to “look it over,” and Bertie, entering ostensibly to buy a magazine in the lobby, looked in at the ball-room and said it looked “good enough.”
“You and Edna sit out here on the piazza, and I’ll take a few turns with Andrée,” he said. “The music’s not bad and the floor looks good.”
“I’d rather you didn’t,” said Claudine. “They’re not at all a nice sort of people here. I don’t think it’s quite the thing—”
Bertie fell back into Edna’s arms like a log.
“Oh—h—h!” he groaned. “Why?”
“You don’t have to be dignified till you get married or inherit money. Tell you what! You come, Mammy! You can dance some nice, old-fashioned sort of waltz. Come on!”
“I ought to!” she thought. “It’s my duty to enter into their amusements—as long as I can’t stop them.”
But after half an hour spent there, she was more than ever determined to influence them—all of them—in an opposite direction, away from this unpalatable and promiscuous vulgarity.
“Don’t you think it is better to be bored than to amuse yourselves in such a way as this?” she asked, on the way home.
“No!” said Andrée and Bertie, simultaneously.
“It seems a pity to me that young people like you—intelligent and well-bred, should be so mad about amusement,” she said. “I can’t understand it! If you were brainless and dull, it would be different. But there are so many really interesting things in the world, so many wholesome and fine recreations—”
“Never heard of them, Mammy! What are they?”
“When I was a girl, we thought it a pleasure to take a country walk with an interesting companion—”
“You wouldn’t like the companions that we’d think were interesting,” said Andrée.
“No,” said Bertie, sadly. “There aren’t any nice amusements left, Mammy. Evolution has done away with ’em.”
She looked at the three faces, at that clever and devilish Bertie, at the sensible, clear-sighted Edna, at Andrée, filled with a strange and wayward inner light.
“But you can’t enjoy that sort of thing!” she cried. “You can’t like to be there, in a room crowded with vulgar, noisy people whom you don’t even know! You must see that these new dances are—to say the very least—ill-bred!”
“I accept!” said Bertie. “Lance was telling me about some fellow that made that his motto, and I think it’s a gol-durned good one! I accept—anything that comes my way.”
“But it doesn’t mean that, Bertie. It means resignation.”
“I know. And we are all resigned, except you. You want to—let’s see—put back the clock of human progress. Very wrong Mammy!”