Come and Find Me

by Elizabeth Robins

And not in dreams alone might he desert them. He might even conceivably insist, against all rational advice and plain duty, he might insist on going back there! The mere idea of his fatuous clinging to the old plan came to exercise over her an almost uncanny power for misery. Not that he continued openly to admit his preoccupation. But it was there—she was sure of that—in his head, more properly in his heart, his refuge, his darling, his delight. She came to feel for it the hatred, and to have before it the involuntarily nerve recoil, that lies for some wives in the thought of another woman. What if she never succeeded in rooting the fancy out of his brain? How was she at least to make sure of preventing his squandering time and money in pursuit of it?—now, when she could not go too, and when his going would mean (as she honestly thought) disaster to her and to the children and the humiliation of falling back for cousinly help on those wise young Missourians, who had seen at once the madness of the scheme.

She patched up the breach with her two kinsmen, and induced them to offer her husband a small position in their bank.

That would hold him.

But although she succeeded in seeing the cripple made teller—as a first step, she was firmly convinced, on the road to a partnership—she was not delivered from her fear. The unspoken dread that he might throw aside the humble, though precious, “sure thing” for this chimera beckoning from the North—the dread of it became the main factor in their spiritual relation. For not only did she never free herself from her grudging love of the man—and never, therefore, from her shrinking at the prospect of separation—not only did she conceive of him in the American way as the property of his family and bound as bondsmen are to serve them to the end, but in addition to all that, more and more as the years went on, did she come profoundly to disbelieve in the validity of his story.

“Do you still think you may go back there one day?” she burst out on one occasion, looking darkly at the reconnaissance map that hung on the dining-room wall. Mar mumbled something about the satisfaction in the verifying of an impression.

“Verifying what? How do you verify pure fancy?” Then turning suddenly upon him, “If ever you do go, you’ll only be giving a fantastic reason for a restless man’s longing to leave his home.”

At moments conceived by her to be critical, she would toss at him the reproach of his well-known visionariness, and all their old foolish hope and its utter loss would be held up to scorn in her saying, apropos of something quite foreign: “That’s like some one I once knew who wanted people to believe in a miracle. But not without proof, he said. He had proof—absolute proof—only he’d lost it.” Or, less offensive, but for Mar no less pointed, the form of skepticism his loss of the nugget had crystallized for her, “You’ve got to have something to show to a Missourian.”

This was later not only adopted by her boys as a favorite family gibe, but introduced into their school, and thence spread abroad as a foolish and pointless saying sometimes will, no one quite knowing why, till all of that generation, whatever their origin, would say with a wag of the head: “You’ve got to show me—I’m from Missouri,” whenever they wished to announce themselves acute fellows by no means to be taken in.

As to the particular matter that gave rise to the saying, Mrs. Mar’s strong personal feeling about it was augmented by outside circumstances. Stories of failure in gold mining were too rife and too well-attested not to have a significance difficult to disregard. Blameless misfortune as well as wholesale swindling, were so much the order of the day in the West, that men of business like the Trennors, when they wanted to promote some mining scheme, must needs have recourse to the gorgeous East. New York had plenty of money for “wildcat” schemes. But no place, the wise would tell you, like conservative old Boston for floating a risky concern. New Englanders were at that distance which lends enchantment. For them gold mining is still a form of romance—the mere thought of it goes to the head like wine.