Bobbie, General Manager: A Novel

by Olive Higgins Prouty

A maid knocked outside the door and spoke to Edith. I didn't hear the message, but Edith gave a little exclamation and hurried away.

"The King Georges or the Kaiser Wilhelms in their aeroplane, no doubt," I muttered, and made a face at my wedding-gown as I yanked down my embroidered mulle.

I am going to skip the details of my wedding—the broiling condition of the thermometer, the sweltering bridesmaids, the crowds, the push, the funny grown-up feeling in my heart when Alec and Tom kissed me good-bye so gently, the joy when the train finally gave a snort and a jerk, and I knew that Edith in her pearls and satin couldn't possibly follow. I am so anxious to describe the funny old brown house that Will and I leased in the shadow of chemistry buildings, law-schools, and dormitories down here in this university town, and the life—the curious, happy, contented life that I drifted into—that I do not want to waste any time.

The week after my wedding Edith sailed with Ruth for four months in Europe. That is how it happened that she wasn't on the ground to superintend the choice of a residence for Will and me. I knew very well that Edith would never have countenanced for a minute the house that we finally decided to rent for the winter. It was a brown, square affair, a door in the middle with a window on each side, not colonial in the least, nondescript as it could be, with a slate French roof. Will and I thought it would answer the purpose, however—even though the bathtub was tin—and moved into it when the brick sidewalk was sprinkled with yellow maple-leaves, and the gutter was collecting dry ones.

I didn't know a soul in the town. I didn't know the name of a single street except our own. I didn't know where to go to buy even a spool of thread. But I wasn't homesick—oh, no, I wasn't homesick. You see I had forgotten the joy of my own kitchen and pantry; I had forgotten what a collander looked like; I had forgotten how sweet a row of cups are hanging by their handles, underneath a shelf edged with scalloped paper!

I enjoyed acting as my own mistress too; though I am sure if Edith had known what I was up to, she would have left all the pleasures of Paris to set me in the right path. For I didn't even unpack some of my wedding presents. They didn't fit in very well with Will's furniture which he had freighted down from the old white-pillared house in Hilton, and every sliver of which I simply adored. It wasn't colonial furniture, understand, which is so fashionable nowadays, but black walnut of the seventies—high-backed armchairs and sofas and marble-topped bedroom tables. There were funny old steel engravings of the United States Senate, battle scenes, and Abraham Lincoln, besides some big heavy bronzes that Will told me were very valuable. The sideboard was black walnut like everything else and Edith's elaborate silver service made it look so out-of-date that I put on it instead my own mother's old coffee-pot—the one that used to be so heavy for me—and our old-fashioned silver water pitcher with four high goblets to match. I didn't even unlock my enormous chest of silver. Alec had let me take from the safe at home the forks and darling thin spoons and knives that had always been in our family. It was like sheltering old friends under my roof to care for them again.

Edith would have hated the life I drifted into. She would have called it "a mere existence" or "worse than the frontier." From September to February, I didn't go to a single luncheon, tea, or bridge! People had called—members of the faculty, I suppose, I'm sure I don't know, for the cards were mere names to me and I was always out when they were left. You see one evening I had run across something in a pamphlet of Will's on our living-room table that set me to thinking. The pamphlet was a sort of bulletin of lectures given by different professors in the college. There was a star after several of the announcements and at the bottom of the page it said, "Open to the Public." I hadn't a notion whether it was the right thing for me to go to them or not, but one rainy afternoon I hunted up Tyler Hall and Room twenty-one on the second floor and slunk into one of the back chairs at five minutes to three, very much frightened and wondering if I would be turned out. The lecture was the second or third of a series given by a Dr. Van Breeze on something in philosophy. I didn't understand more than about two sentences, but no one seemed to question my right to sit there, and I felt ten times more comfortable than I ever had at bridge parties in Hilton.

You see I have never been to college. Although I hated boarding-school with all my heart and soul, I have always had a sneaking idea I might have done better at college. I always liked to study and when I became aware of the fact that Juliet—who, though the best and staunchest girl in the world, was never very brainy—was soaring above me in knowledge, I used to be a little envious. It may seem odd to you for a married woman to be trotting across a campus every other day to attend lectures in class-rooms, as if she were an undergraduate, but after my first plunge into that discourse on philosophy by Dr. Van Breeze I never missed a single lecture in the series. I went the next week and the next and the next; and also bolted bravely into a series of French lectures every Monday afternoon. I liked just to sit and breathe the air of those class-rooms. I liked the long line of blackboards covered with unintelligible words that belonged to a previous lecture, the row of felt erasers, the smell of dry chalk-dust. I liked sitting in those studious-looking chairs with a big arm on one side. It was as strange and foreign as a new country in those class-rooms, with the bare maple-tree branches grazing the window-pane, and in my ears the music of the French language which I hadn't heard since I left high school. I was a thousand, thousand miles away from the atmosphere of limousines and Edith, five hundred and two wedding presents, and a wedding-dress that cost two hundred dollars. It was like a distant echo from another world when I received an invitation for a bridge one day from a Mrs. Percival. It had completely escaped my mind that she was one of the individuals who had given me a dozen Dresden plates. Even if I had recollected I shouldn't have accepted the invitation. Why should I put handcuffs on myself again, now I was once free from a bondage that I loathed? I sent a very proper note of regret to Mrs. Percival, pleading a previous engagement. It was true. An old white-haired gentleman whom I often met at Dr. Van Breeze's lectures had asked me to sit beside him that particular afternoon at three o'clock in Tyler Hall.

I didn't tell Will about the lectures. He was usually busy at the medical school daytimes, and I was always at home when he arrived at six. I was ashamed to confess to Will that I, who never studied a science in my life, was presuming to attend lectures on the Geology of Fuels and Fluxes (for I took in everything that was starred), the Influence of Science upon Religion, and something about the Law of Falling Spheres. I hated to have him laugh at me, so I kept absolutely quiet on the subject of my ridiculous search for knowledge. I didn't even tell him about my new acquaintances.

The white-haired old gentleman and I developed quite a friendship. Every Thursday we used to walk home together as far as the Library, and he would explain things in the lecture that I didn't understand. He called me Pandora in fun because I was so inquisitive and couldn't bear to let things unknown to me alone. Once in a while a queer little man in a frock coat and a soft artist's tie would join us, and a woman—a Miss Avery in an ugly brown suit and a stiff linen collar like a man's. They used to think that my questions were the drollest things they had ever heard in their lives; but I couldn't help but feel that the sweet old man took quite a fancy to me. He gave me a book once on philosophy, by a famous scholar, and another time he asked me to come to his house to meet his wife. Naturally I didn't go, for I wouldn't have let any one guess I was Mrs. William Ford Maynard for all the wives in creation. It was a funny existence to drift into, wasn't it—cake and snow-pudding in the morning (I loved to mess about in the kitchen); economics, geology, philosophy and French in the afternoon; and evenings our open fire and cribbage with dear old Will, by the light of our big bronze lamp? It was a happy existence too.