The Spread Eagle and Other Stories

by Gouverneur Morris

The two mammas worked along similar lines, but for different reasons. Mrs. Burton strove to make Eve ornamental so that she might acquire millions; Mrs. Williams strove to Anglicize and Europeanize her son so that he might ornament those which were already his. Those little spread eagles, the corpuscles in his blood, folded their wings a trifle as he grew older, and weren't always so ready to scream and boast; but they remained eagles, and no amount of Eton and Oxford could turn them into little unicorns or lions. You may wonder why Fitz's father, a strong, sane man, permitted such attempts at denationalization upon his son and heir. Fitz so wondered—once. So wrote. And was answered thus:

… If you're any good it will all come out in the wash. If you aren't any good it doesn't matter whether your mother makes an Englishman out of you or a Mandarin. When you come of age you'll be your own man; that's been the bargain between your mother and me. That will be the time for you to decide whether to be governed or to help govern. I am not afraid for you. I never have been.

So Mrs. Williams was not successful on the whole in her attempts to make a cosmopolitan of Fitz. And that was just enough, because the attempts were those of an amateur. She had lived a furiously active life of pleasure; she had made an unassailable place for herself in the best European society, as at home. She had not even become estranged from her husband. They were always crossing the ocean to see each other, "if only for a minute or two," as she used to say, and when Fitz was at school she spent much of her time in America; and Fitz's short vacations were wild sprees with his father and mother, come over for the purpose. Mr. Williams would take an immense country house for a few weeks, with shooting and riding and all sorts of games thrown in, and have Fitz's friends by the dozen. But, like as not, Mr. Williams would leave in the middle of it, as fast as trains and steamers could carry him, home to his affairs. And even the little English boys missed him sorely, since he was much kinder to them, as a rule, than their own fathers were, and had always too many sovereigns in his pocket for his own comfort.

But Mrs. Burton's attempts to make a charming cosmopolitan of Eve met with the greater success that they deserved. They were the efforts of a professional, one who had staked life or death, so to speak, on the result. Where Mrs. Williams amused herself and achieved small victories, Mrs. Burton fought and achieved great conquests. She saved money out of her thin income, money for the great days to come when Eve was to be presented to society at Newport; and she slaved and toiled grimly and with far-seeing genius. Eve's speaking voice was, perhaps, Mrs. Burton's and her own greatest triumph. It was Ellen Terry's youngest, freshest voice over again, but with the naïvest little ghost of a French accent; and she didn't seem so much to project a phrase at you by the locutory muscles as to smile it to you.

Mrs. Burton had, of course, her moments of despair about Eve. But these were mostly confined to that despairing period when most girls are nothing but arms and wrists and gawkiness and shyness; when their clear, bright complexions turn muddy, and they want to enter convents. Eve at this period in her life was unusually trying and nondescript. She announced that if she ever married it would be for love alone, but that she did not intend to marry. She would train to be a cholera nurse or a bubonic plague nurse—anything, in short, that was most calculated to drive poor Mrs. Burton frantic. And she grew the longest, thinnest pair of legs and arms in Europe; and her hair seemed to lose its wonderful lustre; and her skin, upon which Mrs. Burton had banked so much, became colorless and opaque and a little blotched around the chin. And she was so nervous and overgrown that she would throw you a whole fit of hysterics during piano lessons; and she prayed so long night and morning that her bony knees developed callouses; and when she didn't have a cold in her head she was getting over one or catching another.

During this period in Eve's life the children met for the second time. It was in Vienna. This time Mrs. Burton, as having been longer in residence, called upon Mrs. Williams, taking Eve with her, after hesitation. Poor Eve! The graceful, gracious courtesy of her babyhood was now a performance of which a stork must have felt ashamed; she pitched into a table (while trying to make herself small) and sent a pitcher of lemonade crashing to the ground. And then burst into tears that threatened to become laughter mixed with howls.

At this moment Fitz, having been sent for to "do the polite," entered. He shook hands at once with Mrs. Burton, whom he had never seen before, and turned to see how Eve, whom he vaguely remembered, was coming on. And there she was—nothing left of his vague memory but the immense eyes. Even these were not clear and bright, but red in the whites and disordered with tears. For the rest (Fitz made the mental comparison himself) she reminded him of a silly baby camel that he had seen in the zoo, that had six inches of body, six feet of legs, and the most bashful expression imaginable.

Mrs. Burton, you may be sure, did not lose the start that Fitz gave before he went forward and shook hands with Eve. But she misinterpreted it. She said to herself (all the while saying other things aloud to Mrs. Williams): "If he had only seen her a year ago, even a boy of his age would have been struck by her, and would have remembered her. But now! Now, he'll never forget her. And I don't blame him. She's so ugly that he was frightened."

But that was not why Fitz had started. The poor, gawky, long-legged, tearful, frightened, overgrown, wretched girl had not struck him as ugly; she had struck him as the most pathetic and to-be-pitied object that he had ever seen. I do not account for this. I state it. Had she been pretty and self-possessed he would have left the room presently on some excuse, but now he stayed—not attracted, but troubled and sorry and eager to put her at her ease. So he would have turned aside to help a gutter cat that had been run over and hurt, though he would have passed the proudest, fluffiest Angora in Christendom with no more than a glance. He began to talk to her in his plainest, straightest, honestest Ohioan. It always came out strongest when he was most moved. His mother's sharp ears heard the A's, how they narrowed in his mouth, and smote every now and then with a homely tang against the base of his nose. "Just like his father," she thought, "when some one's in trouble." And she had a sudden twinge of nostalgia.

Fitz lured Eve to a far corner and showed her a set of wonderful carved chess-men that he had bought that morning; and photographs of his friends at Eton, and of the school, and of some of the masters. He talked very earnestly and elaborately about these dull matters, and passed by the opportunities which her first embarrassed replies offered for the repartee of youth. And he who was most impatient of restraint and simple occupations talked and behaved like a dull, simple, kindly old gentleman. His method may not have left Eve with a dazzling impression of him; she could not know that he was not himself, but all at once a deliberate artist seeking to soothe and to make easy.