There has lately turned up, on our scene, one person with whom, doors and windows closed, curtains drawn, secrecy sworn, the whole town asleep and something amber-colored a-brewing—there has recently joined us one person, I say, with whom we might really pass the time of day, to whom we might, after due deliberation, tip the wink. I allude to the Parents' new neighbor, the odd fellow Temple, who, for reasons mysterious and which his ostensible undertaking of the native newspaper don't at all make plausible, has elected, as they say, fondly to sojourn among us. A journalist, a rolling stone, a man who has seen other life, how can one not suspect him of some deeper game than he avows—some such studious, surreptitious, “sociological” intent as alone, it would seem, could sustain him through the practice of leaning on his fence at eventide to converse for long periods with poor Father? Poor Father indeed, if a real remorseless sociologist were once to get well hold of him! Lorraine freely maintains that there's more in the Temples than meets the eye; that they're up to something, at least that HE is, that he kind of feels us in the air, just as we feel him, and that he would sort of reach out to us, by the same token, if we would in any way give the first sign. This, however, Lorraine contends, his wife won't let him do; his wife, according to mine, is quite a different proposition (much more REALLY hatted and gloved, she notes, than any one here, even than the belted and trinketed Eliza) and with a conviction of her own as to what their stay is going to amount to. On the basis of Lorraine's similar conviction about ours it would seem then that we ought to meet for an esoteric revel; yet somehow it doesn't come off. Sometimes I think I'm quite wrong and that he can't really be a child of light: we should in this case either have seen him collapse or have discovered what inwardly sustains him. We ARE ourselves inwardly collapsing—there's no doubt of that: in spite of the central fires, as Lorraine says somebody in Boston used to say somebody said, from which we're fed. From what central fires is Temple nourished? I give it up; for, on the point, again and again, of desperately stopping him in the street to ask him, I recoil as often in terror. He may be only plotting to MAKE me do it—so that he may give me away in his paper!
“Remember, he's a mere little frisking prize ass; stick to that, cling to it, make it your answer to everything: it's all you now know and all you need to know, and you'll be as firm on it as on a rock!” This is what I said to poor Peg, on the subject of Harry Goward, before I started, in the glorious impulse of the moment, five nights ago, for New York; and, with no moment now to spare, yet wishing not to lose my small silver clue, I just put it here for one of the white pebbles, or whatever they were, that Hop o' my Thumb, carried off to the forest, dropped, as he went, to know his way back. I was carried off the other evening in a whirlwind, which has not even yet quite gone down, though I am now at home and recovering my breath; and it will interest me vividly, when I have more freedom of mind, to live over again these strange, these wild successions. But a few rude notes, and only of the first few hours of my adventure, must for the present suffice. The mot, of the whole thing, as Lorraine calls it, was that at last, in a flash, we recognized what we had so long been wondering about—what supreme advantage we've been, all this latter time in particular, “holding out” for.
Lorraine had put it once again in her happy way only a few weeks previous; we were “saving up,” she said—and not meaning at all our poor scant dollars and cents, though we've also kept hold of some of THEM—for an exercise of strength and a show of character that would make us of a sudden some unmistakable sign. We should just meet it rounding a corner as with the rush of an automobile—a chariot of fire that would stop but long enough to take us in, when we should know it immediately for the vehicle of our fate. That conviction had somehow been with us, and I had really heard our hour begin to strike on Peg's coming back to us from her co-educative adventure so preposterously “engaged.” I didn't believe in it, in such a manner of becoming so, one little bit, and I took on myself to hate the same; though that indeed seemed the last thing to trouble any one else. Her turning up in such a fashion with the whole thing settled before Father or Mother or Maria or any of us had so much as heard of the young man, much less seen the tip of his nose, had too much in common, for my taste, with the rude betrothals of the people, with some maid-servant's announcement to her employer that she has exchanged vows with the butcher-boy.
I was indignant, quite artlessly indignant I fear, with the college authorities, barbarously irresponsible, as it struck me; for when I broke out about them to poor Mother she surprised me (though I confess she had sometimes surprised me before), by her deep fatalism. “Oh, I suppose they don't pretend not to take their students at the young people's own risk: they can scarcely pretend to control their affections!” she wonderfully said; she seemed almost shocked, moreover, that I could impute either to Father or to herself any disposition to control Peggy's. It was one of the few occasions of my life on which I've suffered irritation from poor Mother; and yet I'm now not sure, after all, that she wasn't again but at her old game (even then, for she has certainly been so since) of protecting poor Father, by feigning a like flaccidity, from the full appearance, not to say the full dishonor, of his failure ever to meet a domestic responsibility. It came over me that there would be absolutely nobody to meet this one, and my own peculiar chance glimmered upon me therefore on the spot. I can't retrace steps and stages; suffice it that my opportunity developed and broadened, to my watching eyes, with each precipitated consequence of the wretched youth's arrival.
He proved, without delay, an infant in arms; an infant, either, according to circumstances, crowing and kicking and clamoring for sustenance, or wailing and choking and refusing even the bottle, to the point even, as I've just seen in New York, of imminent convulsions. The “arms” most appropriate to his case suddenly announced themselves, in fine, to our general consternation, as Eliza's: but it was at this unnatural vision that my heart indeed leaped up. I was beforehand even with Lorraine; she was still gaping while, in three bold strokes, I sketched to her our campaign. “I take command—the others are flat on their backs. I save little pathetic Peg, even in spite of herself; though her just resentment is really much greater than she dares, poor mite, recognize (amazing scruple!). By which I mean I guard her against a possible relapse. I save poor Mother—that is I rid her of the deadly Eliza—forever and a day! Despised, rejected, misunderstood, I nevertheless intervene, in its hour of dire need, as the good genius of the family; and you, dear little quaint thing, I take advantage of the precious psychological moment to whisk YOU off to Europe. We'll take Peg with us for a year's true culture; she wants a year's true culture pretty badly, but she doesn't, as it turns out, want Mr. Goward a 'speck.' And I'll do it all in my own way, before they can recover breath; they'll recover it—if we but give them time—to bless our name; but by that moment we shall have struck for freedom!”
Well, then, my own way—it was “given me,” as Lorraine says—was, taking the night express, without a word to any one but Peg, whom it was charming, at the supreme hour, to feel glimmeringly, all-wonderingly, with us: my own way, I say, was to go, the next morning, as soon as I had breakfasted, to the address Lorraine had been able, by an immense piece of luck, to suggest to me as a possible clue to Eliza's whereabouts. “She'll either be with her friends the Chataways, in East Seventy-third Street—she's always swaggering about the Chataways, who by her account are tremendous 'smarts,' as she has told Lorraine the right term is in London, leading a life that is a burden to them without her; or else they'll know where she is. That's at least what I HOPE!” said my wife with infinite feminine subtlety. The Chataways as a subject of swagger presented themselves, even to my rustic vision, oddly; I may be mistaken about New York “values,” but the grandeur of this connection was brought home to me neither by the high lopsided stoop of its very, very East Side setting, nor by the appearance of a terrible massive lady who came to the door while I was in quite unproductive parley with an unmistakably, a hopelessly mystified menial, an outlandish young woman with a face of dark despair and an intelligence closed to any mere indigenous appeal. I was to learn later in the day that she's a Macedonian Christian whom the Chataways harbor against the cruel Turk in return for domestic service; a romantic item that Eliza named to me in rueful correction of the absence of several indeed that are apparently prosaic enough.
The powder on the massive lady's face indeed transcended, I rather thought, the bounds of prose, did much to refer her to the realm of fantasy, some fairy-land forlorn; an effect the more marked as the wrapper she appeared hastily to have caught up, and which was somehow both voluminous and tense (flowing like a cataract in some places, yet in others exposing, or at least denning, the ample bed of the stream) reminded me of the big cloth spread in a room when any mess is to be made. She apologized when I said I had come to inquire for Miss Talbert—mentioned (with play of a wonderfully fine fat hand) that she herself was “just being manicured in the parlor”; but was evidently surprised at my asking about Eliza, which plunged her into the question—it suffused her extravagant blondness with a troubled light, struggling there like a sunrise over snow—of whether she had better, confessing to ignorance, relieve her curiosity or, pretending to knowledge, baffle mine. But mine of course carried the day, for mine showed it could wait, while hers couldn't; the final superiority of women to men being in fact, I think, that we are more PATIENTLY curious.
“Why, is she in the city?”
“If she isn't, dear madam,” I replied, “she ought to be. She left Eastridge last evening for parts unknown, and should have got here by midnight.” Oh, how glad I was to let them both in as far as I possibly could! And clearly now I had let Mrs. Chataway, if such she was, in very far indeed.
She stared, but then airily considered. “Oh, well—I guess she's somewheres.”