Black is White

by George Barr McCutcheon

Love, which had been lying bruised and unconscious within him for twenty years and more, arose from its stupor and became a thing to play with, as one would play with a child. The old, ugly vistas melted into dreamy, adolescent contemplations of a paradise in which he could walk hand-in-hand with the future and find that the ghosts of the past no longer attended him along the once weary way.

It would not be true to say that the remarkable personality of the man had suffered. He was still the man of steel, but re-tempered. The rigid broadsword was made over into the fine, flexible blade of Toledo. He could be bent but not broken.

It pleased him to submit to Yvonne's commands,

Not that they were arduous or peremptory; on the contrary, they were suggestions in which his own comfort and pleasure appeared to be the inspiration. He found something like delight in being rather amiably convinced of his own shortcomings; in learning from her that his life up to this hour had been a sadly mismanaged affair; that there were soft, fertile spots in his heart where things would grow in spite of him. He enjoyed the unique spectacle of himself in the process of being made over to fit ideals that he would have scorned a few months before.

She was too wise to demand, too clever to resort to cajolery. She was a Latin. Diplomacy was hers as a birthright. Complaints, appeals, sulks would have gained nothing from James Brood. It would not have occurred to her to employ these methods. From the day she entered the house she was its mistress. She was sure of her ground, sure of herself, fettered by no sense of doubt as to her position there, bound by no feminine notion of gratitude to man, as many women are who find themselves married. It might almost be said of her that she ruled without making a business of it.

To begin with, she miraculously transferred the sleeping quarters of Messrs Dawes and Riggs from the second floor front to the third floor back without arousing the slightest sign of antagonism on the part of the crusty old gentlemen who had occupied one of the choice rooms in the house with uninterrupted security for a matter of nine or ten years. This was a feat that James Brood himself would never have tried to accomplish. They had selected this room at the first instant of occupation, because it provided something of a view up and down the street from the big bow window, and they wouldn't evacuate.

Mrs Brood explained the situation to them so graciously, so convincingly, that they even assisted the servants in moving their heterogeneous belongings to the small, remote room on the third floor, and applauded her plan to make a large sitting-room of the chamber they were deserting. It did not occur to them for at least three days that they had been imposed upon, cheated, maltreated, insulted, and then it was too late. The decorators were in the big room on the second floor.

Perhaps they would not have arrived at a sense of realisation even then if it had not come out in the course of conversation that it was not to be a general sitting-room, but one with reservations. The discovery of what they secretly were pleased to call duplicity brought an abrupt end to the period of abstemiousness that had lasted since the day of her arrival, when, out of courtesy to the bride, they had turned their backs upon the tipple.

Now, however, the situation was desperate. She had tricked them with her wily politeness. They had been betrayed by the wife of their bosom friend. Is it small cause for wonder, then, that the poor gentlemen as manfully turned back to the tipple and got gloriously, garrulously drunk in the middle of the afternoon and also in the middle of the library, where tea was to have been served to a few friends asked in to meet the bride?

The next morning a fresh edict was issued. It came from James Brood, and it was so staggering that the poor gentlemen were loath to believe their ears. As a result of this new command they began to speak of Mrs Brood in the privacy of their own room as “that woman.” Of course, it was entirely due to her mischievous, malevolent influence that a spineless husband put forth the order that they were to have nothing more to drink while they remained in his house.