THE LEVEL OF FORTUNE
BY ABBY MEGUIRE ROACH
She was the ambition of the younger girls and the envy of the less fortunate. Bessie Hall had everything, they said.
Her prettiness, indeed, was chiefly in slender plumpness and bloom. But it served her purpose as no classic mould would have done. She did not overestimate it. But she was probably better satisfied with it than with most of those conditions of her life that people were always telling her were ideal. They spoke of her as the only child in a way that implied congratulations on the undivided inheritance—and that reminded her how she had always wanted a sister. They talked of her idyllic life on a blue-grass stock-farm—when she was wheedling from her father a winter in Washington. They envied her often when they had the very thing she wanted—or, at least, she didn't have it. They enlarged on her popularity, and she answered, “Oh yes, nice boys, most of them, but—”
She had always said, “When I marry,” not “if,” and had said it much as she said, “When I grow up.” And, yes, she believed in fate: that everybody who belonged to you would find you out; but—it was only hospitable to meet them half-way! So her admirers found her in the beginning hopefully interested, and in the end rather mournfully unconvinced. Her regret seemed so genuinely on her own account as well as theirs that they usually carried off a very kind feeling for her. She was equally open to enlistment in any other proposed diversion. For Bessie lived in a constant state of great expectation that something really nice would really happen to-morrow. There was always something wrong to-day.
“It's not fair!” she complained to Guy Osbourne, when he came to tell her good-by, all in the gray. “I'm positively discriminated against. If I have an engagement, it's sure to rain! And now just when I'm beginning to be a grown young lady, with a prospect at last of a thoroughly good time, a war has to break out!”
Her petulance was pretty. Guy laughed. “How disobliging!” he sympathized. “And how modest!” he added—which the reader may disentangle; Bessie did not. “At last!” he mocked her.
For Bessie Hall, whose community already moved in an orbit around her, and whose parents had, according to a familiar phrase, an even more circumscribed course around her little finger—for Bessie Hall to rail at fate was deliciously absurd, delightfully feminine!
When Bessie was most unreasonable one only wanted to kiss her. Guy's privileges in that line had passed with the days when he used to pick up bodily his lithe little playfellow to cross a creek or rain-puddled road. But to-day seemed pleasantly momentous; it called for the unusual. “I say, Bibi, when a knight went off to fight, you know, his lady used to give him a stirrup-cup at good-by. Don't you think it would be really sweet of you—”
She held off, only to be provoking. She would have thought no more of kissing Guy than a brother—or she thought she wouldn't. To be sure, she hadn't for years; there was no occasion; and then, of course, one didn't. She laughed and shook her head, and retreated laughing. And he promptly captured her.... She freed herself, suddenly serious. And Guy stood sobered—sobered not at going to the war, but at leaving her.
“There now, run along.”
“Well, good-by.” But he lingered. There was nothing more to say, but he lingered. “Well, good-by. Be good, Bibi.”
“It looks as if that was all I'd have a chance to be.” The drawl of the light voice with its rising inflection was so engaging, no one called it nasal. “And it's so much more difficult and important to be charming!”
He was sobered at leaving her, but he never thought of not going with the rest. He went, and all the rest. And Bessie found herself, just when nature had crowned her with womanhood, a princess without a kingdom. To be sure, living on the border gave her double opportunities, and for contrasting romances. There were episodes that comforted her with the reflection that she was not getting wholly out of practice in the arts. And there was real adventure in flying and secret visits from Guy and the rest—Guy, who was never again just the same with her; but, for that matter, neither was she just the same with him. But, on the whole, as she pouted to him afterward, she wouldn't call that four years' war exactly entertaining!
The Halls personally did not suffer so deeply as their neighbors except from property loss. All they could afford, and more, they gave to the South, and the Northern invader took what was left. When there was nothing left, he hacked the rosewood furniture and made targets of the family portraits, in the mere wantonness of loot that, as a recriminative compliment, cannot be laid to the charge of any one period or section. Most of the farm negroes crossed the river. Funds ran low.
There had been ease and luxury in the family always, and just when Bessie reached the time to profit by them she remarked that they failed.
Even if the Halls were not in mourning, no one lives through such a time without feeling the common humanity. But Bessie, though she lingered on the brink of love as of all the other deeps of life—curious, adventurous, at once willing and reluctant—was still, in the end, quite steady.
When the war was over, the Halls were poor, on a competence of land run to waste, with no labor to work it, and no market to sell it. And Mr. Hall, like so many of his generation, was too hampered by habit and crushed by reminiscence to meet the new day.
It was the contrast in Guy's spirit that won Bessie. His was indeed the immemorial spirit of youth—whether it be of the young world, or the young male, or the young South—to accept the issue of trial by combat and give loyalty to one proved equally worthy of sword or hand.
“We're whipped,” he told her, “and that settles it. Now there's other work for us than brooding over it. All the same, the South has a future, Bibi, and that means a future for you and me.”
“Not in the manufacture of poetry, I'm afraid,” she laughed. “You dropped a stitch.”
She did not seem to take his prowess, either past or to come, very seriously; and her eyebrows and her inflection went up at the assumption of the “we” in his plans. But—she listened.
His definiteness was itself effective. She herself did not know what she wanted. Something was wrong; or rather, everything was. She was finding life a great bore. But what would be right, she couldn't say, except that it must be different.
Guy looked sure and seasoned as he poured out his plans; and together with the maturing tan and breadth from his rough life, there was an unconquerable boyishness in the lift of his head and the light of his eyes.
“This enthusiasm is truly beautiful!” she teased.
It was, in truth, infectious.
Why! it was love she had wanted. The four years had been so empty—without Guy.
She went into it alert, receptive, optimistic. But it nettled her that everybody should be so congratulatory, and nobody surprised. It wasn't what she would call ideal for two impoverished young aristocrats to start life on nothing but affection and self-confidence.
It did seem as if the choicest fruit always came to her specked.
“Never mind,” Guy encouraged her. “Just give me ten years. It will be a little hard on you at first, Bibi dear, I know, but it would be harder at your father's now. And it won't be long!”
There was only one comment of whose intention Bessie was uncertain: “So Guy is to continue carrying you over the bad places, Bessie?”
Hm! She had been thinking it rather a fine thing for her to do. And that appealed to her.
“And think what an amusing anecdote it will make after a while, Guy,—how, with all your worldly goods tied up in a red bandanna, and your wife on your arm instead of her father's doorstep, you set out to make your fortune, and to live meanwhile in the City of Un-Brotherly Love!”
But Bessie had the standards of an open-handed people to whom economy was not a virtue. There had always been on her mother's table for every meal “salt-risin' light bread” and corn pone or griddle-cakes, half a dozen kinds of preserves, the staples in proportion. Her mother would have been humiliated had there been any noticeable diminution in the supply when the meal was over; and she and the cook would have had a council of war had a guest failed to eat and praise any single dish.
Bessie had not realized how inglorious their meagreness would be, until Mrs. Grey, at the daughter's table, grew unctuously reminiscent about the mother's.
“Dear me!” Guy tried afterward to comfort the red eyelids and tremulous lips, “do you want a table so full it takes your appetite at sight?”
“I'm afraid I can't joke about disgrace!” Bessie quivered.
“But, Bibi dear, Mrs. Grey is simply behind the times. The rationale of those enormous meals was not munificence, but that a horde of house-servants had to be fed at a second table.”
Certainly Guy and his good spirits were excellent company. And Bessie came of a race of women used to gay girlhoods and to settling down thereafter, as a matter of course, into the best of house-mothers.
But there was a difference between the domestic arts she had been taught as necessary to the future lady of a large household and the domestic industries she had to practise. Supervising and doing were not the same. For her mother, sewing and cooking had been accomplishments; for her they were work. She had to do things a lady didn't do.
However, she was as fastidious about what she did for herself as about what was done for her. She was quick and efficient. People said Bessie Osbourne had the dearest home in town, was the best housekeeper, the most nicely dressed on nothing. You might know Bessie Hall would have the best of everything!
And when Bessie began to wonder if that was true, she had entered the last circle of disappointment.
The fact was that, after the first novelty, things seemed pretty much the same as before. Bessie Osbourne was not so different from Bessie Hall. She might have appreciated that as significant; but doubtless she had never heard the edifying jingle of the unfortunate youth who “wandered over all the earth” without ever finding “the land where he would like to stay,” and all because he was injudicious enough to take “his disposition with him everywhere he went.” It was as if she had been going in a circle from right to left, and, after a blare of drums and trumpets and a stirring “About—face!” she had found herself going in the same circle from left to right. It all came to the same thing, and that was nothing. Guy was apparently working hard; but, after all, in real life it seemed one did not plant the adepts' magic seed that sprouted, grew, bloomed, while you looked on for a moment. For herself, baking and stitching took all her time, without taking nearly all her interest, or seeming to matter much when all was said and done. If she neglected things, they went undone, or some one else did them; in any case Guy never complained. If she did what came up, each day was filled with meeting each day's demands. All their lives went into the means and preparation for living. Other people—Or was it really any different with them? Nine-tenths of the people nine-tenths of the time seemed to accomplish only a chance to exist. She had heard women complain that such was the woman's lot in order that men might progress. But it struck her very few men worked beyond the provision of present necessities, either. Was it all a myth, then—happiness, experience, romance? Was this all there was to life and love? What was the sense, the end? Her dissatisfaction reproached the Cosmos, grew to that Weltschmerz which is merely low spirits and reduced vitality, not “an infirmity of growth.”
She constantly expected perfection, and all that fell below it was its opposite extreme, and worthless. She began to suspect herself of being an exceptional and lofty nature deprived of her dues.
Guy was a little disappointed at her prudent objection to children until their success was established. Prudence was mere waste of time to his courage and assurance. And he believed, though without going into the psychology of the situation, that Bessie would be happier with a child or two.
“Oh, how can we do any more?” she answered, in her pretty, spoiled way. “We're trying to cut a two-yard garment out of a one-yard piece now.” At least, she was; and so Guy was.
Well, it wasn't a great matter yet. It is not in the early years of marriage that that lack is most felt. And Bessie was not very strong; she never seemed really well any more. She developed a succession of small ailments, lassitudes, nerves. She dragged on the hand of life, and complained. The local physician drugged her with a commendable spirit of optimism and scientific experiment. But the drawl of the light voice with its rising inflection became distinctly a whine.
She got a way of surprising Guy and upsetting his calculations with unannounced extravagances. “What's the good of all this drudgery? We're making no headway, getting nowhere; we might as well have what good we can as we go along.”
There was a negro woman in the kitchen now, and in the sitting-room one of the new sewing-machines. And Guy, who, so far, had been only excavating for the cellar of his future business house, was beginning to feel that good foundation walls were about to start.
But, even when peevish, Bessie had a way of turning up her eyes at him that reduced him to helplessness and adoration. And she was delicate! “I know,” he sympathized with her loyally, “it's like trying to work and be jolly with a jumping tooth; or rather, in your case, with a constant buzzing in your head.”
The jumping tooth was his own simile. The headaches that had begun while he was soldiering were increasing. He had intermittent periods of numbness in the lower half of his body. It was annoying to a busy man. He could offer no explanation, nor could the doctors. “Overwork,” they suggested, and advised the cure that is of no school—“rest.” That was “impossible.” Besides, it was all nonsense. He put it aside, went on, kept it from Bessie.
The end came, as it always does, even after the longest expectation, with a rush. He was suffering with one of his acute headaches one night, when Bessie fell asleep beside him. She woke suddenly, with no judgment of time, with a start of terror, a sense of oppression, or—death?
“Guy!” she screamed.
The strangeness of his answering voice only repeated the stab of fear. She was on her feet, had made a light....
He was not suffering any more. He was perfectly conscious and rational. But from the waist down he could not move nor feel.
The doctors came and talked a great deal and said little; they reminded them that not much was known of this sort of thing; they would be glad to do what they could....
“You don't mean to say this is permanent? Paralyzed? I? Oh, absurd!” Awful things happened to other people, of course—scandal, death—but to one's self—“Oh, it doesn't sound true! It can't be true. Paralyzed? I?”
And Bessie wondered why this had been sent on her.
The explanation was hit on long afterward, when in one of his campaign stories Guy mentioned a fall from his horse, with his spine against a rock, that had laid him unconscious for twenty-two hours.
And so the war, which had been responsible for their starting together with only a past and a future, was responsible for their having shortly only a past. Guy was not allowed his ten years.
Though he had now less actual pain, the shock seemed to jar the foundations of his life, and the sharp change in the habits of an active and vigorous body seemed to wreck his whole system. For months and months and months he seemed only a bundle of exposed nerves—that is, where he had any movement or sensation at all.
Now a past, however escutcheoned and fame-enrolled, is even more starvation diet than a future of affection and self-confidence. No help was to be had from either of their homes; it was the day of self-help for all.
Bessie wondered why this had been sent on her, but she took a couple of boarders at once, she sold sponge-cake and beaten biscuit, she got up classes in bread-making. And Guy stopped her busy passing to draw her hand to his lips, or watched her with dumb eyes.
Several of her friends, after trying her sewing-machine, then still something of a novelty, ordered duplicates. Guy suggested as a joke that she charge the makers a commission.
“The idea of trading on friendship?” Bessie laughed.
“Oh, I don't know,” Guy reflected, more seriously. “How about these boarders, then? That's trading on hospitality.”
It was one of those minute flashes of illumination that, multiplied and collected, become the glow of a new light, the signal of a revolution. The country was full of them in those days. The old codes were melting in the heat of change. Standards were fluid. Personally, it ended in Bessie's selling machines, first in her town, then in neighboring ones.
In the restlessness that youth thinks is aspiration for the ideal, particularly for the ideal love, is a large element of craving for place and interest. After her marriage, at least, Bessie might have had enough of both; but the obvious purpose was too limited to appeal to her. Now two appetites and the four seasons supplied motive enough for industry. There was nothing magnificent in this manifest destiny, but it had the advantage of being imperative and constant. It was no small tax on her acquired delicacy, but it gave less time for hunting symptoms. It did not answer the Whence, Whither, and Why; it pointedly changed the subject. Her work began to carry her out of herself.
“Bibi dear, what a sorry end to all my promises!”
She had been thinking just that herself with a sense of injury and imposition; and she was used all her life to having people see everything as she saw it, from her side only. But Guy had just turned over to his few creditors the hole in the ground into which so far most of his work had gone. “Bibi dear, what a sorry end to all my plans!” was what she expected him to say. And what he did say and what he didn't, met surprised in her mind and surveyed each other.
“Oh, Guy!” she deprecated, suddenly ashamed. For the first time it occurred to her to wonder why this had been sent on him. With a rush of remorseful sympathy and appreciation, she slipped down beside his chair. “My poor old boy!”
He clung to her like a drowning man—Guy, who, after the first single cry at the blow, had been so self-contained (or self-repressed?) through it all!
She remembered that she had omitted a good many things lately.
“You're tired to-day,” he said.
“Yes, I am.” She caught at it hurriedly with apologetic self-defence. “I'm pretty constantly tired lately. And this morning Mrs. Grey was so trying. She doesn't understand her machine, and she doesn't understand business, and she was too silly and stupid. I don't wonder you men laugh at us and don't want us in your affairs!”
“It's all hard on you, Bibi.” There was a lump in his voice. It was the first time he had been able to speak of it.
“Yes;” her own throat was so strained that for a moment she could not go on. “But,” it struck her again, “I don't suppose an unbiased observer would think it exactly festive for you.”
And, to be sure, when one came to think of it, how, pray, was he to blame?
From that day there began to be more than necessity to her work, and more than work to carry her out of herself.
In the present of commercial femininity we have two types—one, the business man; the other, an individual without gender, impersonal, capable. She never does anything ill-bred, certainly, but one no more thinks of specifying that she is a lady than that her hair is black; it isn't the point.
Mrs. Osbourne, however, was always first of all a lady. With her, men kept their hats off and their coats on, and had an inclination to soften business with bows, and bargains with figures of speech. She was at once so patrician and so gracious that women felt it a kind of social function to deal with her. The drawl of the light voice with its rising inflection was only gently plaintive. The pretty way was winning, and rather pathetic in her position; it drifted about her an aroma of story, and that had its own appeal. The unvarying black of dress and bonnet, with touches of white at neck and wrist, was refined, and made her rosy plumpness look sweeter. It was all an uninventoried part of her stock in trade. And she came to take the same satisfaction in returns in success and cash that she had taken as a girl in results in valentines and cotillion favors.
Mrs. Osbourne had all the traditions of her class and generation. She let her distaste of the situation be known. If it had been possible, she would have concealed it like a scandal. As it was, with very proud apology, she made the necessity of her case understood: her object was bread and butter, not any of these new Woman's Rights—unwomanly, bourgeoise!
Nevertheless, it was not only true that it suited her to be doing something with some point and result, but that the life of action and influence among people suited her. The work came to interest her for itself as well as for its object; that interest was a factor in her success; and the success again both stimulated and further equipped her.
As she got into training and over the first sore muscles of mind and body, work began to strengthen her. The nerves and small ailments grew secondary, were overlooked, actually lessened. There need be nothing esoteric in saying that a vital interest in life is as essential to health as to happiness. One need consider only the practical and physical effects of interest and self-forgetfulness, serenity and self-resource.
Sometimes her increasing trade took her away for two or three days, as far as Louisville or Cincinnati. The thought of Guy followed her, a sweet pain. She found herself hurrying back to her bright prisoner, and because of both conditions the marvel of that brightness grew on her, together with certain embarrassed comparisons. More than anything else, she admired his strength where she had been weak.
His brightness seemed to her the most pathetic thing about him; it was so sorry. It was indeed the epitome of his tragedy. To be as unobtrusive as possible, and, when necessarily in evidence, as pleasant as possible, was the role he had assigned himself. It was the one thing he could do, the only thing he could do for her.
Doubtless the very controlling of the nervousness helped it. Moreover, his revolting organization was gradually adapting itself somewhat to the new conditions. Sensitive and uncertain tendrils of vitality began to creep out from the roots of a blighted vigor.
Bessie, increasingly perceptive, began to suspect that what she saw was the brightness after the storm. She wondered what his long solitary hours were like when she was away. What must they be, with him helpless, disappointed, lonely, liable to maddening attacks of nerves? But he assured her that he was perfectly comfortable; Mammy Dinah was faithful and competent; and he was really making headway with the German and French that he had taken up because he could put them down as need was, and because—they might come in, in some way, some time. “In heaven?” Bessie wondered secretly, but, enlightened by her own experience, saw the advantage of his being entertained.
“You're too much alone,” she said, feeling for the trouble. “And so am I,” she added, thoughtfully. She should have noticed his eyes at that last. He had developed a sort of controlled voracity for endearment, but he never asked for it. In the old days he had taken his own masterfully, with no doubts. Now he waited. He did not starve. She cajoled him and coaxed his appetite and patted the pillows, and made pretty, laughing eyes at him and fate quite in her habitual manner. Her touch and tone of affection had never been so free. But in that very fact he found another sting.
“The better I do on the road, the more they keep me out,” she was saying. “We can't go on this way. I've been thinking lately—Could you bear to go North, Guy, and to live in a city, among strangers? Perhaps at headquarters there might be an opening for me that would let me settle down.”
“What! Cincinnati! Is there any such chance?”
“You'd like it? Why on earth—Are you so bored here?”
“Oh, Bibi, have you never thought of it? In a city there'd be some chance of something I could do!”
“You? Oh, Guy!” After she had accepted the care of him, and that so pleasantly, he wasn't satisfied! “Is there anything you lack here?” She was hurt.
It was replaying the old parts reversed. Once he had grieved that he could not give her enough to content her.
“A—h—” He turned his head away and flung an arm up over his eyes.
She understood only that he was suffering. “But, Guy, there's nothing you could do, possibly. It's not to be expected. Have I complained?” She fell back on the kindly imbecility of the nurse. “Now you're not to worry about that, at least until you're better—”
“Better?” He forgot the lines in which he had schooled himself. The man overrode the amateur actor. “That's not the thing to hope for. Why couldn't it have killed me—that first fall?” (“My dear, my dear!” she stammered.) “There would have been some satisfaction in getting out of the way, and that in decent fashion; like a charge of powder, not like a rubbish-heap. I can't accept it of you, Bibi. I'm enraged for you. I can't be grateful. I'm ashamed.”
She understood now.
What could she say? A dozen things, and she did; things about as satisfying as theology at the grave. He did not answer nor respond. When he relaxed at last it was simply to her arms around him, his head on her bosom, her wordless notes of tenderness and consolation.
He was suffering, and chiefly for her, and what a fighter he was! Who but he would ever have thought of his doing anything?
So there might be cases in which it was really more helpful and generous not to do things for people, but to let them do for themselves. She couldn't fancy his doing enough to amount to anything. He oughtn't to! But if it would make him any happier he should have his make-believe—yes, and without knowing it was make-believe. Doing things that were of no value to any one was so disheartening. She knew. Like perfunctory exercise for your health.
Her own business in Cincinnati proved so brief as to take her breath. His was more difficult. The plough was still mightier than either sword or pen. Few markets were open to an inactive man whose hours must be short and irregular, and whose chief qualifications seemed to be a valiant spirit and a store of reminiscences, in a time when reminiscences were as easy to get as advice.
She was delayed in her return, growing more and more anxious at the thought of his anxiety. When she boarded the south-bound train, she went down the aisle, looking for a seat, with her short steps hurried as if it would get her home sooner.
Mrs. Grey leaned over and motioned her, and as she sat down, looked critically at the bright eyes and pink cheeks. “You certainly do look well nowadays, Bessie.”
Doubtless Bessie's color was partly excitement and rush.
“Oh, I'm well,” absently.
“Funny kind of dyspepsia, wasn't it, to be cured by eating around, the way you have to do.”
“Oh, dyspepsia!” The nettles brought back her attention. People needn't belittle her troubles! “I still have that dyspepsia. But if you had to be as busy as I, Mrs. Grey, you'd know that there are times when nothing but sudden death can interfere.” Even Mrs. Grey's prickings, however, were washed over to-day by Balm of Gilead. “Still, it has come to something. The company has given me Cincinnati for my territory.”
“Really?” Not that Mrs. Grey doubted her veracity. “Well, you always did succeed at anything you put your hand to. It has been the most surprising thing! You know, I tell everybody, Bessie, that you deserve all the credit in the world for the way you have taken hold.” Bessie stiffened; neither need they sympathize too much! “A girl brought up as you were, who always had the best of everything.” The best of everything! The familiar phrase was like a bell, sending wave after wave of memory singing through Bessie's mind. “And still I never saw any one to whom the wind has been so tempered as to you: when you were sick you could afford it, and now that it's inconvenient—Things always did seem to work smoother with you, and come out better, than with any of the rest of us.”
Bessie sat looking at her, and, in the speech, saw her own petulance of a moment before—any number of her own speeches, in fact, inverted, as things are in a glass. Indeed, Mrs. Grey had held up a reflector. Bessie had met herself. And she saw herself, as in a mirror-maze, from all angles, down diminishing perspectives, from the woman she was to the girl she had been.
She had been quite unconscious of the slow transformation in her habits of thought. It is so in life. One toils up the thickly wooded hillside, intent only on the footing, and comes suddenly on a high clearing, overlooking valley and path, defining a new horizon.
“I never had the best of everything, Mrs. Grey,” she said. “Nobody has. Every life and every situation in life has its bad conditions—and its good ones. I haven't had any more happiness—nor trouble than most people. It strikes me things are pretty equally divided. We only think they aren't when we don't know all about it. We see the surface of other people's lives, not their private drawbacks or compensations. There are always both. But other people's troubles are so much easier to bear than our own, their good luck so much less deserved and qualified! With all I had as a girl I didn't have contentment. And now, with all I lack, I don't know any one with whom I'd change places.”
What was the use with Mrs. Grey?
But alone, the thought kept widening ring after ring: How little choice there was of conditions in life; how fortune tends to seek its level; how one man has the meat and another the appetite; and another, without either, can find in the fact the flavor of a joke or chew the cud of reflection over it. Of the three, Bessie thought she would rather be the one with the disposition. But that could be cultivated. Look at hers! Circumstances had started it in a sort of aside, but she would take the hint.
The cure for dissatisfaction was to recognize one's balance of good.
Guy was watching for her at the window. She was half conscious that he looked unusually haggard, but there were so many other thoughts at sight of him that they washed over the first.
She swung her reticule. “It's all right!” and she ran up the walk, a most feminine swirl of progress. She got to him breathless. “I've found a house that will give you its German correspondence to translate and write, and it won't be so much but that you can do it as you're able, within reason. Now, sir!”
For a minute it seemed as if Guy's whole body was alive. The weak and shaken invalid still had something of unconquerable boyishness in the lift of his head and the light of his eyes. “Good! That will do for a start.” The old spirit, to which hers always answered. If she didn't believe he would actually do something worth while in the end! Then promptly, of old habit, he thought of her. “Bibi! You took your time for that.”
“Not all of it, in good sooth, fair lord.” She spread out her skirts, lady-come-to-see fashion, and strutted across the room. “Mrs. Osbourne has a new 'job' and a 'raise.'” (Incidentally Mrs. Osbourne had never before been so advanced in her language.)
“Bully for you!” he shouted, so genuinely that she ran back to him and shook and hugged his shoulders. How she liked him!
“What a thorough girl you are, Bibi!”
“Oh, and to-day I've been laughing at myself; as silly as I used to be, counting so much on a mere change of circumstances. Of course something unpleasant will develop there too. But at least the harness will rub in a different place. On the whole, it will be better. Guy, do you know, I have just gotten rid of envy and discontent, and that without endangering ambition. I'll give you the charm; it's a sort of cabalistic spell—the four P's—Occupation, Responsibility, Purpose, and Philosophy.”
“Yes,” he said, “the most worth-while thing in life is to feel you are accomplishing something—doing your work well and getting proportionate returns.”
The tone touched her. “Poor old Guy!” so generously congratulatory of her flaunted advantages. How stupid she was! Poor Guy! her pretty creed scattered at a breath like a dead dandelion-ball. Envy she had disposed of, but what about pity? What had he to make up? “The idea of my talking of happiness, with you caged here!”
“Perhaps that was the point of it all,” he said, “to give you your chance.”
“That would be a beautifully humble thing for me to think, now wouldn't it?” Yet she had once complained that the point of it all was to interfere with her. “And so sweetly generous. Your chance being—?”
“To serve as a means of grace to you?” He smiled. “I am glad to be of some use—and honored to be of that one!” he hurried to add, elaborately humorous.
But what she was noticing was the flagging effort of his vivacity. Her half-submerged first impression of him was coming to the surface: he did look unusually haggard. “You haven't been good while I was away. Now don't tell stories. Don't I know you? No more storms, Guy!” she warned.
His eye evaded hers. “I am seriously questioning whether you ought to make this change. All your friends are here.”
“Oh, as to that! There might be advantages in working among strangers. Mrs. Grey fairly puts herself out to let me understand that she is a friend in need!” She reined herself up, recollecting, but too late. “Oh, Guy, don't mind so for me. Why, the South is full of women doing what I am, only so many of them are doing it—without—the Guys who never came back!”
“Lucky dogs!” subterraneously. Then, seeing her apprehensive of a second flare-up of that volcanic fire: “So gentlemanly of them, too, Bibi. How can those few years of love be worth a life of this to you?”
“Those few years? why, Guy! of love? Is that how you feel?” Her eyes filled; her whole face quivered. “Oh, Guy—be willing for my sake. I never knew what love could mean until lately.”
His grasp hurt her knuckles. “Yes, dear, I have seen. It's very sweet. It's the mother in you, Bibi, and my helplessness. Of course! What could a woman love in a dependent, half-corpse of a no-man?”
For a moment she was too surprised to speak. She stared at him. “What a notion! and it isn't true! You never were any more a man than you've been through these two dreadful years.” She sounded fairly indignant. “And for my part, I never appreciated what you were half as much.”
“Love doesn't begin with a P,” he remarked to the opposite wall.
“But what do you suppose the purpose was?”
“Love?”
“More. You.”
“You never told me.” That strange voice and averted face!
“How should I fancy you wouldn't know? I had never thought it out myself until just now. It has simply been going on from day to day, as natural and quiet as growing—” A bewildering illumination was spreading in her mind. “Look here, young man”—she forced his face around to see it,—“what goblins have you been hatching in the night-watches?” The raillery broke. “Dear, is that what has been troubling you? Is there anything else?”
He looked at her now. “Anything else trouble me, if I really have you, and a chance to do a little something for you?”
It was their apotheosis. They had never known a moment equal to it before; could never know just another such again. In a very deep way it was the first kiss of love for them both.
Bessie came back to herself with that sense of arriving, of having been infinitely away, with which one drops from abstraction.
Where had they been in that state of absent mind?
It was as if they had met out of time, space, matter.... And as she thought of his words, in the light of his eyes, pity too was qualified, and that without endangering helpfulness. He, too, had his balance of good. Yes, things squared in the end.
Her creed was quick. The scattered dandelion seed sprouted all around her.