Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man

by Marie Conway Oemler

CHAPTER XVI[ToC]

"WILL YOU WALK INTO MY PARLOR"

It is impossible for me to put down in her own words what Mary Virginia told the Butterfly Man and me. Also, I have had to fill in gaps here and there, supplying what was lacking, from my intimate knowledge of the actors and from such chance words and hints and bits of detail as came to me afterward. But what I have added has been necessary, in order to do greater justice to everybody concerned.

If it be true that the boy is father to the man, it is even more tritely true that the girl is mother to the woman, there being here less chance for change. So it was with Mary Virginia. That gracious little girlhood of hers, lived among the birds and bees and blossoms of an old Carolina garden, had sent her into the Church School with a settled and definite idealism as part of her nature. Her creed was simple enough: The world she knew was the best of all possible worlds, its men good, its women better; and to be happy and loved one had only to be good and loving.

The school did not disabuse her of this pleasing optimism. It was a very expensive school and could afford to have optimisms of its own. For one thing, it had no pupils poor enough to apply the acid test.

When Mary Virginia was seventeen, Mrs. Eustis perceived with dismay that her child who had promised beauty was instead become angular, awkward, and self-conscious; and promptly packed the unworldly one off to spend a saving summer with a strenuously fashionable cousin, a widow, of whom she herself was very fond. She liked the idea of placing the gauche girl under so vigorous and seasoned a wing as Estelle Baker's. As for Mrs. Baker herself, that gay and good-humored lady laughed at the leggy and serious youngster and promptly took her education in hand along lines not laid down in Church Schools.

Mrs. Baker was delighted with her own position—the reasonably young, handsome, and wealthy widow of a man she had been satisfied to marry and later to bury. She had an unimpaired digestion and no illusions, a kind heart, and the power of laughter. Naturally, she found life interesting. A club-woman, an ultra-modernist, vitally alive, she was fully abreast of her day. Her small library skimmed the cream of the insurgents and revolutionaries of genius; and here the shy and reticent schoolgirl with the mark of the churchly checkrein fresh upon her, was free to browse, for her cousin had no slightest notion of playing censor. Mrs. Baker thought that the sooner one was allowed to slough off the gaucheries of the Young Person, the better. She did not gauge the real and tumultuous depths of feeling concealed under the young girl's simplicity.

The revolutionaries and the insurgent and free poets didn't trouble Mary Virginia very much. Although she sensed that something was wrong with somebody somewhere—hence these lyrical lamentations—she could not, to save her, tell what all the pother was about, for as yet she saw the world couleur de rose. Some one or two of the French and Germans pleased her; she fell into long reveries over the Gael, who has the sound of the sea in his voice and whose eyes are full of a haunting light, as of sunsets upon graves. But it was the Russians who electrified and dazzled her. When she glimpsed with her eyes of a young girl those strange souls simple as children's and yet mosaiced with unimaginable and barbarous splendors, she stood blinking and half blinded, awed, fascinated, and avid to know more of that sky-scaling passion with which they burned.

And in that crucial moment she chanced upon the "Diary of Marie Bashkirtseff," so frank and so astounding that it took her breath away and swept her off her feet. She was stirred into a vague and trembling expectancy; she had the sense of waiting for something to happen. Life instantly became more colorful and more wonderful than she had dreamed could be possible, and she wished passionately to experience all these emotions, so powerful and so poignant. The Russian's morbid and disease-bright genius acted upon her as with the force and intensity of a new and potent toxin. She could not lay the book aside, but carried it up to her room to be pored and pondered over. She failed to understand that, untried as she was, it was impossible for her to understand it. Had the book come later, it had been harmless enough; but it came at a most critical moment of that seething period when youth turns inward to question the universe, and demands that the answer shall be personal to itself. The first long ground-swell of awakening emotion swept over her, sitting in the pleasant chintz-hung room, with the Russian woman's wild and tameless heart beating through the book open upon her knees. And these waves of emotion that at recurrent intervals surge over the soul, come from the shores of a farther country than any earthly seas have touched, and recede to depths so profound that only the eyes of God may follow their ebb and flow.

Mrs. Baker, however, saw nothing about which to give herself any concern. If she perceived the girl intense and preoccupied, she smiled indulgently—at Mary Virginia's age one is apt to be like that, and one recovers from that phase as one gets over mumps and measles. Mrs. Baker did think it advisable, though, to subtly detach the girl from books for awhile. She amused herself by allowing her wide-eyed glimpses of the larger life of grown-ups, by way of arousing and initiation. Thus it happened that one afternoon at the country-club, where Mary Virginia, at the green-fruit stage, found herself playing gooseberry instead of golf, Mrs. Baker sauntered up with a tall and very blonde man.