Once back in New York, I took an early occasion to call on my friend Charles Longbow. I had always liked him ever since the day that I fished him, a shivering mite, out of the skating-pond at school. I had been his chum thereafter until the end of my college course. Though I could not emulate his distinction in scholarship or public speaking, I could at least be useful to him, by virtue of my year’s seniority, in protecting him from the consequences of his mother’s celebrity. I even did him some service by pushing him into the thick of undergraduate life. I was really very fond of him, and I was sure he liked me.
If I had seen less of Charlie in later years, it was merely because our paths did not often cross in a natural way. We boast about our civilization a good deal, but we keep to our trails much as savages do—or animals, for that matter. Besides, for some years I had a good reason, not connected with Charlie’s mother or himself, for keeping away from the Longbow house. So I had been with him less than I could have wished, though I had never lost the habit of his friendship. I was busy in my own way, and he was occupied in his. He had never been the conspicuous success that his youth had promised, but he was more widely known than many men with a greater professional reputation. To the larger public he was always, of course, his mother’s son. At forty he was what one might call a philanthropic lawyer. He did a certain amount of ordinary business, and he wrote on many topics of contemporary interest for the reviews, made many addresses to gatherings of earnest people, served on many boards and commissions. He had retained the modesty and generosity of his boyhood, which made some of us devoted to him even though we were not in full sympathy with all of his activities. Pride and vain-glory in him were purely vicarious: he was a little conceited about his mother.
As far back as my college days I had begun to distrust the estimate in which Mrs. Longbow was held by her family and, as well as one could judge, by herself. All of them, be it said, were supported in their opinion of her greatness and her abounding righteousness by the world at large. It was one of my earliest disillusionments to discover the yawning vacuity that lay behind her solid front of fame; it was a sad day for me, though it fostered intellectual pride, when I found out that she was not such a miracle of goodness as she seemed. Though Charles, as a matter of course, knew her much more intimately than I, I think that he never penetrated her disguise.
With his sisters the case was somewhat different, as I began to suspect not long after my own private discovery. They were a little older than Charles, and had better opportunities of watching their mother at close range. Helen married, when she was about twenty-five, a man of her own age, who eventually became one of the most prominent editors in New York—Henry Wakefield Bradford. She made him a good wife, no doubt, and had some share in his success both as debtor and as creditor. Whether she loved him or not, she supported his interests loyally. Though she had made an escape from her mother’s house, she did not desert her. Indeed, in Helen’s marriage Mrs. Longbow might truly have been said to have gained a son rather than to have lost a daughter. The Bradfords were ardent worshipers at the shrine, and they worshiped very publicly. In private, however, I detected a faint acidity of reference, a tinge of irony, that made me suspect them of harboring envious feelings. Perhaps they resented the luster of satellites, and would have liked to emulate Mrs. Longbow’s glow of assured fame. Helen never seemed to me a very good sort, though we were accounted friends. She had many of her mother’s most striking qualities.
Margaret, who was only a year older than Charles, never married. She was her mother’s secretary and a most devoted daughter. She received with her, traveled with her, labored for her without apparent repining. Whether she ever had time to think seriously of marrying, or of leaving her mother on other terms, always seemed to me doubtful. At all events, she said as much to me repeatedly when at the age of twenty-five I proposed to her. Without question, she had a great deal to do in helping Mrs. Longbow to transact efficiently the business of the universe. She was prettier than Helen, who grew large and stately by her thirtieth year and was of too bold and mustached an aquiline type for beauty. Margaret was fair, and retained the girlish lines of her slender figure until middle age. She was clever, too, like the rest of the family, and had seen much of the world in her mother’s company. She wrote stories that had considerable success, and she would have had personal distinction as a member of any other family. My only reason for suspecting that she sometimes wearied of her filial rôle was a remark that she once made to me when I complimented her on a pretty novel she had published.
“Oh, yes,” she replied, “one has to do something on one’s own account in self-defense. Mother swallows everybody—she is so wonderful.” The final phrase, I thought, did not altogether let Mrs. Longbow out.
They were all writers, you see, all well known on the platform and in the press, all active in good works and reform; but the children’s celebrity shone mainly with a borrowed light. Irreverently enough, I used to think of the mother as being like a hen with chicks. The hen’s maternal clucking calls less attention to her brood than to herself.
When I went to see Charles, I expected to find him overwhelmed with genuine grief, and Margaret, if she appeared at all, endeavoring to conceal the relief that was sure to be mixed with her natural sense of loss. Of course, Helen—Mrs. Bradford, that is—I should not see, for she had her own house. I should have to pay her a visit of condolence separately. I dreaded this first meeting, though I was really very sorry for Charles, whose devotion to his mother could not be doubted. I knew that he would expect me to say things at once consoling and laudatory, which would be difficult to frame. With so vocal a family, the pressure of a hand and a murmured word would be insufficient expressions of sympathy.
When I reached the old house rather too far east on Thirty-eighth Street, I was in a state of mind so craven that I would gladly have shirked my duty on any pretext whatsoever; but I could think of none. Instead, I had to tell both Margaret and Charles how deeply I felt their loss. I found them up-stairs in the library, a dismal room with too much furniture of the seventies, a mean grate, and heavy bookcases filled with an odd collection of standard sets, reports of philanthropic societies and commissions, and presentation copies of works in all fields of literature and learning. I cherished a peculiar dislike for this room, and I found no help in its dreadful reminders of Mrs. Longbow’s active life. I did not quit myself well, but I managed to speak some phrases of commonplace sympathy.
Charles, lean, dark, and bearded, took up my words, while Margaret drooped in her chair as though some spring had gone wrong inside her.