Bobbie, General Manager: A Novel

by Olive Higgins Prouty

Edith's social activities are simply marvellous to me. She has her plan of campaign—the various combinations of people to be invited to dinner-parties, bridges, or small teas, all mapped out and written down in a book at the beginning of each season. Then she manages to inveigle, by means of big fat cheques, I imagine, lions—pianists, and authors, and lecturers, whom everybody wants to see and hear—to act as her guest of honour. So her parties are always rather popular, you see. Oh, Edith is clever. She may not understand my nature very well, but to the likes and dislikes, pet ambitions and pleasures of human-nature generally she can cater to the queen's taste.

She has fairly hypnotised Ruth. My little sister thinks there is no one like her. As soon as Edith married Alec, she took complete possession of Ruth, provided her with a lot of lovely clothes and sent her off, for the first winter, to a fashionable boarding-school in New York. After eight dazzling months of that sort of life she ordained that Ruth should return to Hilton and "come out." Last fall she gave her a reception that fairly thrilled the town. Edith's word is sacred law to Ruth; Edith's opinion the ultimatum to any doubt on any question whatsoever. I am a mere speck on Ruth's outlook on life; my ideas don't count; I am so old-fashioned and so easily shocked; I don't know what style is; I don't possess a scrap of what Edith calls social-sense. Perhaps as much as anything else it is Edith's complete possession of Ruth that hurts me. It seems a shame that she couldn't have been satisfied with Alec. I don't see why she had to rob me of my only sister too. I don't cry about it (I won't let myself) but I think I've missed my own mother more since I was twenty than before I was ten. It may be a comfort to mothers whose little children have grown out of the helpless age to know this from a grown-up daughter.

I don't know what to say to you about my brother Alec. I wonder sometimes what has become of him. I see him, I hear him speak, I reply, but I might as well be gazing at his picture and talking with him over the long distance 'phone. I have no idea what he thinks about this new life of ours. He doesn't confide in me any more; we are almost strangers now. Of course I should expect him to be loyal to his wife—he's such a thoughtful man that he wouldn't hurt Edith's feelings for anything—but I wonder and wonder where all his old qualities have gone. Alec used to be so firm and determined, so frugal and economical. Are those qualities still smouldering away down deep in him somewhere, or when Edith took possession of his house, did she take possession of his soul too, and sweep out everything she didn't like, just as she cut off the cupola and sold the iron fence? Some men let women do that with them, especially if it's a woman they've wanted terribly for a dozen years, and never thought themselves good enough for her to accept. Why, Alec simply wants to please Edith and her family in every human way that he can. I have an idea that he feels so grateful to Edith for accepting him, and to Mr. Campbell for saving the business, that he doesn't dare disagree with a single solitary thing the Campbells ever do or think or suggest. I believe my brother is so overcome by living in such continual grandeur, sleeping in a bed with gold trimmings—Napoleonic, Edith says—bathing in a bathroom with Florentine tiles, entertaining all the big bugs within a hundred miles, and travelling to the office every morning in a limousine, that he feels that he must have been a mere worm when Edith picked him up. I think he's more of a worm now! Anyhow he doesn't show any backbone.

Sometimes at the table I glance at him across the flowers, and once in a long, long while there's a look in his eyes when they meet mine that I recognise as my dear brother's. Usually it's when Ruth and Edith are discussing society; and after one of these clandestine meetings of Alec's and mine across the flowers, I always come up here to my room wonderfully comforted, with a feeling that I am not absolutely deserted, after all.

Perhaps that sounds as if I were unhappy. Please do not think so, because I'm not. I'm bound not to be. I should be ashamed of myself, if just because I happened to be ousted from my job and didn't fancy my successor, I simply "went out into the back yard and ate worms." That isn't what I'm doing at all. Once Alec was married and I had made up my mind that I couldn't run away to New York and earn my way, or hire a house of my own and live by myself, I buckled down and did my level best to adjust my likes and habits to the conditions of Edith's reign. One can get used to anything, I believe. I accepted Edith as a person ought to accept any circumstance that can't be avoided. What if her ambitions do seem to me unworthy? What if she has crowded me out of my little niche? What if the customs and the things I liked are desecrated before my very eyes? All this will not cripple me, as a chance railroad accident might. I'm not enduring physical torture. I can still see, and hear, and use my two unhampered feet for long sweet walks in the country. What if, indeed, Edith has robbed me of Alec, and Ruth too? She cannot rob me of the joys of out-of-doors, the messages to me in books, the thrill I feel at the sound of distant music.

I can generally find several hours every day when I am able to steal away somewhere by myself with a book. I never had much time to read when I was younger and no one to suggest and guide as I grew up. I had never read Vanity Fair even, nor Silas Marner, nor David Copperfield. So after Alec was married, I made it my task to catch up with other girls of my age. I have my nose buried inside a novel most all of the time now. At first I used to drive myself to it, allot myself a certain number of chapters to read each day and accomplish it as if it were a stint. Now I simply devour a book in great hungry bites and wish there were more when I am finished. I don't know what I should do if I hadn't learned to love to read. I wonder if it would open up other sources of joy if I should learn to appreciate symphony or Italian Art. Perhaps Beethoven and Leonardo da Vinci, mere names to me now, would become as individual and inspire me with their messages as deeply as dear old Stevenson, whom I couldn't live without.

I think you must have surmised by this time that I haven't proved a great belle in society. You're exactly right. In the first place I hate bridge! Whenever I attempt to play, I get hot all over, and I wish I could unhook my tight collar and roll up my prickly sleeves. When it comes my turn to play, and I find myself desperately at a loss to know whether to trump or not—my partner looking daggers at me across the table and everybody waiting in dead silence—I simply give up all responsibility in the matter, repeat to myself: "Eenie, meenie, mynie moe, Catch a nigger by the toe," etc., and fling down the card that's "it," in utter abandon. Of course, that isn't good bridge, and Edith says I'll never make a player. She says I don't possess any more card-sense than social-sense. I wonder what kind of sense I do possess anyhow! It was a big consolation when I learned that the emptiest-headed women often make the best card players, simply because no superfluous ideas are at work in their brains to interrupt the train of concentrated card thought.

I'm not much more successful in conversation than I am in bridge. I seem to be always on the outside of women's intimacies somehow. Edith's set know one another so confidentially—keep tabs on the gowns, the hats, the jewellery, the number of servants each one has, and guess at one another's incomes. And then they use such a lot of mysterious signs! Sometimes raised eyebrows, a little nod toward a person's back, very tightly pursed lips, somebody abruptly twirling her two thumbs, will set off a whole roomful into peals of laughter, while I simply sit dazed and blank. It's just so with Ruth's younger crowd too. They're always giggling or making unintelligible remarks. You see I'm a kind of an in-between age, not old enough for Edith's set, nor young enough for Ruth's. The girls I used to know in the high school have not proved to be of the fashionable society here in Hilton, and Edith won't let me have them at the house. I've drifted away from most of them, except Juliet Adams, who is doing settlement work in New York, and I can't find any one to take their place.

I've come to the sad conclusion that I'm not popular with men either. At the little dances given here in Hilton occasionally, I'm not a wall-flower, possibly because I'm Edith Vars' sister-in-law, but I'm never "rushed." I can't be very brilliant in conversation at a dance when I'm anxiously watching for some kind, charitable soul to deliver my partner from the fear of two numbers in succession with me. And I have a sneaking conviction that I don't dance very well. You see all Ruth's set "Boston" to a waltz and two-step, and I don't know how. When a man is good enough to ask me to dance it seems too bad to make him exercise until he perspires. No one knows that I don't enjoy dances very much. It looks as if I were having a good time, I suppose, but down in my heart I'm worried and afraid.

At first I used to be eagerly on the lookout for my ideal—for a fleeting glimpse of a face that resembled the picture locked away in my secret desk-drawer. But such a quest is mere nonsense. I go to Boston to shop with Edith quite often; but never, in all the trains, railroad stations, restaurants, or elevators in law-office buildings (where one runs across so many good-looking men) have I seen even once the face of my desire. Why, I searched for that face throughout Oliver's and Malcolm's entire class when they graduated from college; I look for it among the new young men that come to call on Ruth, but I can't find it. Yet if I ever do marry, the man must be born by this time, I suppose. Sometimes, especially when I listen to music, I wonder where he is, in just what city, what house, what room he is sitting at that particular moment. I smile to think how unconscious he is of me, who some day will fill his life completely, and how surprised he'd be if he knew that I was loving him even now.