4
Only when she had waved Keble farewell from the back of the train at Witney did Louise allow herself to dwell on the significance of the step she had taken. Keble’s generous acquiescence in her plan merely underlined the little question that kept irritating her conscience. For all her skill she hadn’t known how to assure Keble that she wasn’t turning her back on him; for all her love she couldn’t have admitted to him that she was setting out for a sanatorium, to undergo treatment for social ignorances in the hope of returning to him more fit than ever. With the train now bolting east, she had the nervous dread of a prospective patient.
Yet as province after province rolled by, and the dreary prairie began to be broken first by lakes and woods, then by larger and larger communities, graduating her approach into civilization, her natural optimism asserted itself in a typically vehement reaction. Now that there was no turning back, the obvious thing to do was to wring every possibility out of the experience to which she was committed. Nothing should be too superficial for her attention. To Miriam’s relief her despondency gave place to a feverish activity of observation. She began to notice her fellow-travelers and to tick them off mercilessly, one by one, with all their worths and blemishes.
“Let’s leave no stone unturned, Miriam,” she said, imperatively, as they neared their first halting place. “I won’t go home till I’ve done and seen and had one of everything. Then for the next eighty years I shall be able to out-small-talk the most outrageous dude that ever dares cross my threshold.”
She kept rein on the excitement caused in her by the hotels, shops, museums, and theatres of Toronto and Montreal, for from Miriam’s lukewarmness she divined that they were at best but carbon copies of the hotels, shops, museums, and theatres of New York. So she contented herself with watching the movements of her companion, marveling at Miriam’s easy way with porters and chambermaids, her ability to arrive on the right platform ten minutes before the right train departed, to secure the most pleasant rooms at the least exorbitant rate and order the most judicious dinners, all without fuss or worry. Having learned that traveling was one of the major modern arts, she added it to the list of subjects in which she was enrolled as student. By the time they had reached Fifth Avenue and put up at a hostelry that was still imposing, though it had been half forgotten in the mania for newer and gayer establishments, Louise was imperturbable.
During the next few days the experience that made the deepest impression on her was the religious earnestness with which one was expected to cultivate one’s exterior. On a memorable, but modest visit to Winnipeg with her father,—who was attending a medical conference,—she had “gone in and bought” whatever she had been in need of. Never had she dreamt that so much art and science could be brought to bear on the merely getting of oneself groomed. But after a few seances in the neighborhood of Fifty-Seventh Street, Louise threw herself into this strange new cult with characteristic fervor. This was partly due to the fact that Madame Adèle, the dressmaker, and Monsieur Jules, the hairdresser, had accomplished what good portrait painters often accomplish, and thrown into relief properties of body and soul of which she had never been aware.
At the end of a fortnight she had mastered many rites, and when the last frocks, hats, gloves, and slippers had arrived, and she had adapted her steps and gestures and rhythms to the unbelievable new picture she made, Miriam, for the first time since their association, expressed herself as satisfied.
“I’ve been waiting to see you dressed,” she announced as they sat in the tea-room of a fashionable hotel. “It’s the final test. And you pass—magna cum laude. Opposite you I feel dull and not at all what you would once have called distinguished-looking.”
“Don’t be absurd, Miriam,” returned her pupil in an even tone, with a purified articulation that would have made Minnie Hopper stare. “I may cost eight hundred dollars more than you at the moment, but I look new, and you know it. Whereas you will always look good, without looking new, no matter if you’re straight out of a bandbox. If I’ve made any progress at all, the proof of it is that I recognize the truth of what I’ve just said. . . . Not only that, but you can console yourself with the knowledge that if you sit opposite me till Doomsday you’ll never utter a syllable that couldn’t be printed in a book of etiquette. Whereas I,—well, the mere fact that they’ve pulled out my lopsided eyebrow doesn’t mean that before the sun sets I shan’t do and say some inadvertent bêtise that will proclaim the pit from which I was digged and make you say to yourself, ‘Why does she?’. . . . One comfort is that most of these expensive people here are even more plebeian, at least in their souls, than I am, and you’re almost the only person in the world whom I can’t fool. . . . Fancy not having you there to be genteel to, and to shock,—especially to shock! At any moment I may deliberately say something vulgar, dear. The temptation often comes over me in hot waves.”
“The ‘deliberately’ redeems you. Most people are vulgar without knowing it; they would bite off their tongues if they knew. . . . As for inadvertence, you’ve made only one faux pas in days.”
“Oh, dear! What?”
“Yesterday, at that awful house.”
“Mrs. Pardy’s? Why, darling, you took me there yourself, as a treat.”
“Yes, but it was Elsa Pardy we went to leave cards for. Elsa was one of the nicest girls in Washington when I knew her there. I would never have looked her up in that casual way if I had foreseen such a fulsome sister-in-law.”
Louise laughed at the recollection, snuggling into the thought that Mrs. Pardy could not be laid at her door. Then came the thought of her alleged remissness. “I hope I didn’t out-faux Mrs. P. . . . I wonder how Keble would like me to call him Mr. E.”
“No wonder Elsa doesn’t stay there.”
“But, Miriam, my faux pas! I won’t be done out of my daily correction.”
Miriam smiled indulgently. “It was the merest trifle. Indeed if Mrs. Pardy had made it, it would have done her credit. For that matter she did, effusively, and if we hadn’t been such fastidious folk we should have lauded her for it. And I do!”
“Miriam . . . before I throw a bun at you!”
“Well, my dear, you invited the woman to pay you a visit.”
“Jolly kind of me, too. Is that all?”
“Heavens, it’s enough!”
“I was merely returning a hospitality,—the hospitality of your friends.”
“Don’t tease.”
“After all, what less could I do when she practically gave us her house and her chauffeur and her marble staircase and diamond bracelets and ancestral lemon groves in California.”
“None of which we wanted, you see. Nor asked for a thing! Nor accepted a thing except under compulsion. The mere fact that one strays into a house that looks like a glorified Turkish bath and has it, as you say, given to one, doesn’t put one under the slightest obligation. We merely sat on the edge of her golden chairs, regretted Elsa’s absence, heard about Mr. P.’s kidneys and sundry organs, and drank a cup of tea.”
“And ate a cream puff. Don’t slight that delicious, cordial, luxurious, fattening, vulgar cream puff. I ate two and longed for a third. That made it a grub-call, and I had to invite her back. I’ll never outgrow that primitive custom. Besides, I took care to say, if she was ever in my part of the world. That made it pretty safe.”
“Ah, that’s just what made it an error. Not only because it was gratuitous, but because Mrs. Pardy is the sort of woman who would charter a private train to be in your part of the world in order, accidentally, to drop in on a young woman who makes the sort of impression you make,—for you do, you know. Especially when she finds out,—and be sure she’ll investigate,—who the Eveleys are.”
“Well, darling, let her come. She didn’t bother me a bit. It would be rough on Keble, I suppose.”
“Rough and warm,” said Miriam a little testily. “She had the effect on me of heavy flannels in midsummer.”
Louise gleefully pounced on her opportunity. “Fi donc! Miriam Cread conjuring up such incorrect things as flannels,—and it isn’t anywhere near Doomsday!”
“It’s near dressing time. And we must pack a little before dinner. After the theatre we’ll be too tired.”
“How shall we explain our sudden departure to Mrs. Pardy? Before she sends out invitations to all her friends to ‘meet’ us!”
“We can have the measles. Or you’re moving to Alaska.”
“And if ever she and Mr. P. are in the Arctic Circle. . . . Measles wouldn’t do the trick. She would come right in and nurse us. And give us her doctor and her florist. Frankly, dear, I rather like Mrs. Pardy; she’s so hearty. I thought that was going to rhyme but it didn’t.”
“Come along. We’re going to walk home, for exercise.”
“In these heels? . . . Is fifty cents enough to leave the waiter?”
“Enough, good gracious! Leave the brute a quarter.”
They made their way through a thronged corridor towards the street, and Miriam felt a proprietary pride in her companion, whose present restraint was as instinctively in keeping with her tailored costume, unostentatious fur, and defiant little hat, as her old flamboyance had been with her khaki breeches and willow switch.
“Since I’ve begun to spend money,” Louise reflected, “I’ve been more and more oppressed by the unfairness of my having access to so much,—though of course it’s nothing compared to what one sees flung about in this bedlam. But all these exaggerated refinements, and people taking notice,—while it excites me, I don’t honestly care for it. There’s something as uncomfortable about it as there would be about ‘boughten’ teeth. Sartorial hysteria; the rash known as civilization; I keep saying phrases like that to myself. . . . After about the fifth time I think I’d bite that beauty woman. I like my face too well to have it rubbed out once a week!”
They turned into Fifth Avenue and joined the hordes let loose at this transition hour of the day. Against the grey buildings women were as bright as flowers, fulfilling, as Miriam reflected, the decorative function that trees fulfil on European boulevards.
“I had a cheque from Keble to-day,” Louise continued. “As if we hadn’t heaps already! It came in a charming letter. Keble in his letters is much more human than he is in the flesh. If I stayed away long enough I might forget that and fall romantically in love with him all over again. Which would be tragic. . . . He says he’s happy, poor lamb, to know that I’m beginning to take an interest in life! But I wish he’d be candid and say he’s miserable. Then I’d know what to do. When he so obstinately pretends to be happy and isn’t, I’m lost. Miriam, look at that creature!”
It was a bizarrely clad woman, so thoroughly made over in every detail of appearance that there was scarcely a square inch of her original pattern left: a weird, costly fabrication that attracted the attention of everybody within range of vision or smell.
“Do you know who it is?” asked Miriam, amused at the startled look in her companion’s eyes.
“No, do you? She looks Japanese.”
“Merely East Side. It’s Myra Pelter, the actress we’re to see to-night in ‘Three Blind Mice’.”
Louise yielded to a temptation to turn and stare. “Now there you are, Miriam: the reductio ad absurdum of hectic shopping and beautifying. Isn’t it enough to drive one into a nunnery! I’m glad we’re on our way to the seashore, where there are at least ‘such quantities of sand’ and sky and water.”
Miriam smiled doubtfully, a little wearily. “There will be quantities of transparent stockings and French perfumes, too, my dear.”
“Well, I like frivolities, as such,—but only as such, mind you. From now on I ignore them the minute they try to be anything more. I think I’m going in for human souls. I’m already tired of looking at people as Adèle looks at them, or as if they were books in a shop window. I’m going to open a few and see what they’re all about. . . . The worst of it is, you can’t look at the last chapter of people and see how they end. You can only read them, as you can only read yourself, in maddeningly short instalments. They’re always on the brink of new doings when you come to a ‘to be continued’. And I’ve reached a point where I must have gists and summaries, must see what things are leading to, what’s being driven at in this infuriating universe,—this multi-verse.”
They had by this time reached their rooms, and Miriam was making a preliminary sorting of objects to be packed. “Don’t you think,” she ventured, “that you are inclined to be a little headlong as a philosopher?”
Louise was deftly choosing the articles of her toilette for the evening. “Oh, no doubt of it! But I’m too deep in my sea now to care. I simply swim on and on, after a shoal of notions.”
“And splash a little,” commented Miriam, with an abstracted air that saved the remark from being censorious. She was wondering whether she had been over-scrupulous in refusing the gown that Adèle had privately offered her by way of commission. And a little resentful that Adèle should dare offer it to her. Miriam was old enough to remember a day when such transactions were considered off-color, and it bothered her that she should be so old-fashioned as to be unable to accept the place assigned her in the callous new order, as some of her former friends, with the greatest complacence, seemed to have done. Suddenly, bereft of credit in a society to which she had once felt herself a necessary adjunct, catching occasional glimpses of faces that recalled school-days to her, and Newport and Paris, faces now hard, bright and mercenary, Miriam felt abandoned.
Her thoughts strayed westward and hovered. In Alberta she had been an exile; but not so acutely alone as here.