Meanwhile Madge, though freed from the trammels of Miss Snellgrove, was very busy at home with her trousseau and other matters. She was supremely happy these days; happy even in Harry's absence, because she could feel that he was doing better work than he could with her near, and that provided just the element of self-sacrifice that every woman—every woman that is worth anything—yearns to infuse into her love. She had ample opportunity of trying her hand at writing love letters, but, to tell the truth, she was never very good at it. Neither was Harry, for that matter; possibly because he was now putting every ounce of creative power in him into something the result of which justified the effort much better.... But suppose we allow some of the letters to speak for themselves.
Dear Inamorato: (wrote Madge one day in November) I'm not at all sure that that word exists; it looks so odd in the masculine and just shows how the male sex more or less spoils everything it touches. However! I've been hemming towels all day and am ready to drop, but after I finish with them there will be only the pillow cases to attend to before I am done. By the bye, what do you suppose arrived to-day? Four (heavily underscored) most exquisite (same business) linen sheets, beautifully hemstitched and marked and from who ("Good Heavens, and the woman taught school!" exclaimed Harry) do you think? Miss Snellgrove! Wasn't it sweet of her? That makes ten in all. Everybody has been lovely and we shall do very well for linen, but clothes are much more difficult. In them, you see, I have to please not only myself but Mama and Aunt Tizzy as well. I went shopping with both of them yesterday, and they were possessed to make me order an evening gown of black satin with yellow trimmings which was something like a gown Aunt Tizzy had fascinated people in during the early eighties. It wasn't such a bad idea, but unfortunately it would have made me resemble a rather undersized wasp. We compromised at last on a blue silk that's going to have a Watteau pleat and will fall in nice little straight folds and make me look about seven feet high. Aunt Tizzy is too perfectly dear and keeps telling me not to scrimp, but her idea of not scrimping is to spend simply millions and always go ahead and get the very best in the extravagantest way, and my conscience rebels. I hope to pick up some things at the January sales in New York; if you are there seeing about your play at that time we can be together, can't we? I still have to get a suit and an afternoon gown and various other things the nature of which I do not care to specify!
I run over and look in on Aunt Selina every time I get a chance. She is so dear and uncomplaining about being left alone and keeps saying that having me in the house will be as good as having Beatrice, which is absurd, though sweet. Heavens, how I tremble when I think of trying to fill her shoes!
I must stop now, dearest, so good-night. Ever your own,
Madge
O O O O O O
Those O's stand for osculations. Do you know how hard it is to kiss in a small space? Like tying a bow-knot with too short a piece of ribbon.
For Heaven's sake, my good woman (wrote Harry in reply), don't write me another letter like that! How do you think I feel when, fairly thirsting for fire and inspiration and that sort of thing, I tear open an envelope from you and find it contains an unusually chatty Woman's Column? How do you suppose poor old D. Alghieri would have written his Paradiso if Beatrice had held forth on the subject of linen sheets, and do you or do you not suppose it would have improved Petrarch's sonnets if Laura had treated him to a disquisition on the ins and outs of the prices of evening gowns?
Remember your responsibility! If you continue to deny me inspiration my play will fail and you will live in disgrace and misery in the basement of a Harlem tenement in an eternal smell of cabbages and a well-justified fear of cockroaches, with one cracked looking-glass to see your face in and dinner served up in a pudding basin!
The c. of my b. (that was his somewhat flippant abbreviation of child of my brain) is coming along well enough, considering. The woman is shaping quite well. What was the name you suggested for her the last time I saw you? If it was Hermione, I'm afraid it won't do, because every one in the theater, from Bachmann down to the call-boy, will call it Hermy-one, and I shall have to correct them all, which will be a bad start. I call her Mamie for the present, because I know I can't keep it. What would be the worst possible name, do you think? Hannah? Florrie? Mae? Keren-happuch and Glwadwys also have their points.
Please forgive me for being (a) short-tempered; (b) tedious. I was going to tear up what I have written, only I decided it would not be quite fair, as you have a right to know just how dreadful I can be, in case you want to change your mind about February.—What a discreetly euphemistic phrase!—It has grown fearfully cold here, and we had the first skating of the winter to-day. I got hold of some skates and went out and, fired by the example of two or three people here who skate rather well, I swore I would do a 3-turn or die in the attempt. The latter alternative occurred. I am writing this on the mantelpiece.
Farewell. Write early and write often, and write Altman catalogues if you must, but not if you are interested in the uplift of drahmah. Give my best to Grandmama, and consider yourself embraced.
Io El Rey.
Madge's reply to this missive was telegraphic in form and brief in substance. It read simply "Sorry. Laura." "I would have signed it Beatrice," she explained in her next letter, "only I was afraid you might think it was from your sister-in-law Beatrice, and there's nothing for her to be sorry about."
Another letter of Harry's, written a few weeks later, shows him in a different mood:
Querida de mis ojos—You don't know Spanish but you ought to gather what that means without great effort—I have weighty news for you. I dashed down to New York on the spur of the moment day before yesterday and showed the first draught of my completed MS to Leo. My dear, he said IT WOULD DO! You don't know what that means, of course; no one could. You all think I have simply to write and say 'Here, play this,' and it is played. You know nothing of how it hurts to put ideas on paper, nothing of the dead weight of responsibility, the loneliness, the self-distrust, the hate of one's own work that the creative brain has to struggle against. Consequently, my dearest, you will just have to take it on trust from me that an interview such as I had yesterday with Bachmann is nothing less than a rebirth. He even advised me not to try to change or improve it much, saying that what changes were needed could best be put in at rehearsals, and I think he's dead right. So I shall do no more than put the third act in shape before I hand the thing over to him and dash home for the holidays. Atmosphere of Yule logs, holly berry and mistletoe!
I really am absurdly happy. You see, it isn't merely success, or a premonition of success (for the first night is still to come); it's in a way a justification of my whole life. If this thing is as good as I think it is, it will amount to a sort of written permit from headquarters to love you, to go on thinking as I do think about certain things and to regard myself—well, it's hard to put into words, but as a dynamic force, rather than as a lucky fool that stumbled across one rather good thing. Not that I shouldn't do all three anyway, to be sure!—And every kind friend will say he knew I would 'make good'; that there never was any doubt my 'coming into my own,' and all the rest. Oh, Lord, if people only knew! But thank Heaven they don't!
I am becoming obscure and rhapsodic. I seem to 'see' things to-night, like Tilburina in the play. I see strange and distorted conceptions of myself, for one thing; endless and bewildering publicity. Oh, what a comfort it is to think that no matter what I may be to other people, to you I shall always be simply the same stupid, bungling, untidy
Harry!
I love you with an intensity that beggars the power of human expression.
I did a bracket this afternoon.
Madge never received a letter from him that pleased her more. She was fully alive to its chaotic immaturity, and she smiled at the way he unconsciously appeared to shove his love for her into second place. But there was that about it that convinced her of his greatness as nothing had yet done. It seemed to her that when he spoke of the loneliness of genius and in his prophetic touch at the end about the different ways in which people would regard him he spoke with the true voice of a seer. It all made her feel very humble and solemn. To think that Harry, her Harry, that tall thin thing with the pink cheeks and dark brown hair and the restless black eyes, should be one of the great men of his day, perhaps one of the great ones of all time! Keats—Harry was already older than Keats when he died, but she thought he had much the same temperament; Congreve—she knew how he loved Congreve; Marlowe—she had often compared his golden idealism to that of Marlowe; Shakespeare...? No, no—of course not! She knew perfectly well he was no Shakespeare.... Still, why not, in time?... And anyway, Marlowe, Congreve, Keats—Wimbourne!
So she dreamed on, till the future, which hitherto she had seen as merely smiling toward her, seemed to rise and with solemn face beckon her to a new height, a place hard to reach and difficult to hold, but one whose very base seemed more exalted than anything she had yet known....
Now Madge was, on the whole, a very fairly modern type of young woman. Her outlook on the world was based on Darwin, and she held firmly to such eugenic principles as seemed to flow directly from the doctrine of evolution. She had long since declared war to the death on disease, filth and vice, to which she added a lesser foe generally known as "suppression of facts," and she had done a certain amount of real work in helping those less fortunate than herself to the acquisition of health, cleanliness, virtue and "knowledge." She thought that women would get the vote some day, though they weren't ready for it yet, and hadn't joined the Antis because there was no use in being a drag on the wheels of progress, even if you didn't feel like helping. She believed in the "social regeneration" of woman. It was quite clear to her that in the early years of the twentieth century women were beginning—and only just beginning—to take their place beside men in the active work of saving the race; "why, you had only to look at Jane Addams and Florence Nightingale to see—" et cetera.
And yet, and yet....
It was at least as fine a thing to become Mrs. Harold Wimbourne and devote a lifetime to ministering to one of the great creative geniuses of the time as to be a heavy gun on her own account, was what she meant, of course. But that wasn't quite enough. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Harry were not one of the great creative geniuses of the age; suppose there were no question of Congreve, Keats, Wimbourne and so forth; suppose being his wife meant being plain Mrs. Harold Wimbourne and nothing more—what then?