The gods on Mount Olympus, if it be they that control gray, heavy-lidded days like these, had compassion on me and let to-day be Friday. I’d have killed all the children in another day, and now I have until Monday to get back to something akin to normal. I must have looked my mood when I came in, for poor old mammy had brought me hot toast and tea and delicious peach jam. I received it with gratitude, but when she began the recital of that well-known story in which she stood and received my great aunt’s false teeth in her last hour, when she launched into my great uncle’s handing them to her with the words, “Give these into the hands of this faithful servant,” I leaped up so abruptly that I frightened her. I wonder if I really meant to pitch the dear, faithful old soul out the window? I am developing temperament, or is it temper? Perhaps it is all due to the outside world. The snow sifts bleakly from a bleak sky. What am I to do with these walled-round-by-winter days? What am I to do with this woman whose outward appearance is mine? She terrifies me. For thirty years I’ve tended my little garden plot of life in placid content; cheerfully I’ve hoed my bean and cabbage rows. Now I want to dynamite these homely plants. Where the cabbages stand in rows I want red roses; I can’t abide beans a minute longer, and in their stead I would like purple orchids. And there’s something else I want: I want to cry and cry on a broad man shoulder—not John’s shoulder. Half timidly I glance over my own shoulder as I write it. My own mother never kissed my father until after they were married, and my grandmother all her life long dressed and undressed behind the shelter of the door of the great wardrobe that is here in my room this very minute, but no reproachful ghosts are gazing at me. And if all the spinsters in this broad land with their battle cry of freedom and suffrage (I’ve got freedom and I’m willing for suffrage) had had the sort of day I’ve had with the children—it’s been a wild beast of a day and its sharp claws have drawn blood—when twilight came they would do just what I am doing now. They would whisper into the firelit gloom which invites reckless confidences, as I am whispering, “Eve, Eve, you want your Paradise, don’t you?” I do solemnly believe that soon or late this moment comes to every woman; I do solemnly believe that she can no more escape this dominant reaching out of her heart, this dominant yearning for that other one in the world of two outside of which the rest of humanity is excluded. Since when have you believed this, Caroline Howard? Honest now. Face Dicky’s letter—aren’t you the daughter of a soldier?
This time it’s a big, blond young German—a baron. A slight accident to his hand brought about the acquaintance. Always, Dicky “did” his hand for him. The acquaintance progressed to the point that he knew her afternoon off. “Of course,” Dicky writes, “it flattered me to find him waiting outside the hospital—and with a taxi.”
It seems they had the gayest of drives, but when they turned in at the Pennsylvania Station Dicky demanded the meaning of it. The baron was ready with an answer. He told her that they were going away to an ideal life where they would always be together and always alone. Dicky objected. Her protest was smothered in the depths of the baron’s hat, flung quick as magic over her face.
“How I ever emerged from the embrace of that hat with a smiling face I don’t know. I must thank a year’s training at the hospital for that. I came out game—cool on the outside, at any rate. I said: ‘We can’t go away together without baggage—think of the scandal of it.’ From the depths of the cab he produced a big black bag. But I said, ‘That won’t help me.’ It didn’t work. He said in Washington we would buy enough clothes to last me forever. I fell in gayly with his plans. Inside the station he bought tickets to Washington. I tried to get near the ticket window, but he flanked the move. There seemed to be no people in the station. The few that were there were miles apart in isolated little groups. Just before our train was called, standing together as alone as if we were already on the desert to which he said we would go when we left Washington, a stream of incoming people surged up from the left wing of the station. I felt sure one of the men was Bobby Haralson—he or his double. I asked the baron to let me say good-bye to an old friend, as we were never coming back. He agreed.
“‘Aren’t you Mr. Haralson?’ I gasped. ‘If you are, don’t you remember the little gypsy girl who answered your ad?’
“‘Sure Mike, I do,’ he said, and swung his bag into his left hand and gave me a hearty right hand. My face must have shown that something was wrong, for he drew me out of the crowd, put down his travelling bag, and asked me, oh, so quietly, what was wrong. His quiet manner calmed me. As briefly as I could I told him. He grasped the situation in a lightning-like flash. ‘Go back to him,’ he said. ‘Keep cool. I’m on to the job.’ Had I been on to my job I’d never have got in that cab. The morning paper says he’s a baron all right. It says he’s a lunatic all right, too. And he has been sent to a private asylum.
“He took his arrest quietly. It was so unexpected it dazed him. I was so limp after it was all over that Bobby Haralson took me over to the Waldorf and made me drink a milk punch. Then he brought me home. We had a heavenly time, and I promised not to be naughty again.
“At the door, he didn’t come in; he said good-bye with that smile that lights and warms up his face—you remember I told you how reticent and sort of impersonal he is—and he said next time I wanted an adventure just send out a wireless and he would answer. I didn’t tell him about you, Caroline. You have tried so hard to make a hoyden into a lady that I did not reveal my identity.”
December 8th.
What an odd, spoiled Bobby! I have a letter from him. Last fall—the afternoon I went to town and came back with the ill-fated gown—I sent him the picture. The P. M. (Particularly Mean) letter was the little note that demanded its return after we failed to meet in our promenade down in our yard. Bobby expects an answer by return mail—it is in every confident line of his letter. Mr. Robert Haralson, spoiled darling of your town, once an old lady of my acquaintance sent her husband across the mountain to get some “camfire” for her. The gum was dissolved in whiskey. He drank it and was very sick. I was present when, convalescent, he humbly asked for chicken soup. The old lady, with uplifted forefinger said, “Nary a chicken will ye git.”