The shops were simply gorgeous with their red and green decorations, and people carried packages, looked tired, but smiled. It was the greatest fun in the world to go out on Saturday mornings and scrunch through the snow to the subway, and then delve into the crowds, who laughed and pushed and hurried with such good nature. Amy and I could hardly wait for school to close. And in school notes simply flew, all of them containing confidences about the furs the writer hoped to get, or the ostrich-feather fan she knew she was going to get, having seen the long package on the hall table.
Aunt Penelope told us to make notes of what we wanted, and it was what we did the Saturday afternoon I met Mr. Apthorpe. Evelyn, who had not been awfully well since she had that bad cold, sat in the living-room with Amy and me, and we were enjoying being together.
“I am going to ask for a Russian sable coat,” said Amy, who was sucking the point of her pencil and looking down at the pad she held, “because I think it is a duty to look for the best. Some poet--I’ve forgotten who--said: ‘Hitch your waggon to a star.’?”
Evelyn said that one would be a falling star.
“But perhaps you could persuade father that I need one,” Amy went on. “You have a tactful way and seem to be very chummy with him lately.”
“Oh, Baby!” said Evelyn (Baby is the family pet name for Amy), “you should be ashamed of yourself! Why don’t you give father a Christmas present of not asking for the impossible and not whining for what he can’t give you?”
Amy’s face was a study in amazement. “But you----” she said.
“Have reformed,” said Evelyn, and then she went back to her lists. She was working hard, figuring out how little she dared give people who had entertained her. Amy looked at her, then she scribbled a note and passed it to me, pretending it was a list of girls in our school that we were going to ask to tea during the holidays.
“She is mourning for Herbert,” she had written. I nodded and felt ever so sorry for Evelyn. She had been very kind and unnatural for ever so long, and it was plain that something had made a big dent in her feelings. She was ashamed of the way she had let sharpness grow on her, you could see that, and I think she was going through a lot in realizing how unpleasant she had often been, and trying not to be so any more. In a way, any reform is an operation, for you yourself cut out something that was wrong and didn’t belong in you, and even a skilled surgeon hurts you when he cuts off anything that shouldn’t grow on you. I know, for I had a wart removed. My simile is somewhat mixed, but I still shine most brilliantly in athletics. I became right forward and captain of our basket-ball team after one game, but that is beside the point.
After we had written our lists and had had tea and discussed where the tree should be set, I said I wanted to go walking, and asked if anyone else did, and, after they refused, I started out. It was lots of fun to walk, because a little thaw had made a sheet of ice over everything, and going was a difficult matter. You had to slide on every little incline, and I stood in our apartment-house door for quite a while watching those who strolled and--slipped. They would mince along and then--zip! They’d go for perhaps five feet and end up by doing a bunny-hug to a tree that stands by the alleyway gate. And as I stepped forth, I, too, slid and--into Mr. Herbert Apthorpe. He tried to steady me, almost lost his balance, and then we laughed.
“I’m Evelyn’s cousin,” I said, as I walked by him (I made his direction mine); “I suppose you’ve forgotten me.”
He said he hadn’t, to be polite, but I knew he had.
“We were speaking of you to-day,” I went on. “Evelyn hasn’t been well, and she said she wished you would come up.” I stole a side look at him and saw that his face looked stiff and that his eyes were steadily fixed ahead. He didn’t look encouraging.
“I am flattered,” he said; and the way he said it made the snow-banks warm little nesting-places in comparison.
I knew he wasn’t at all flattered, but just said so to let me know he wasn’t. I tried a little more finesse, and it didn’t work, and then--I dropped tact, which has never done a thing for me but make me trip, and relied on crude truth.
“Didn’t you like Evelyn?” I asked. I was sure he did, or I wouldn’t have said what I then did.
“Very charming girl,” he said stiffly.
“Then why do you hurt her?” I asked. He looked at me after that.
“What?” he asked. I repeated my question. And he echoed it in a vacant way, only putting “I” in place of “you.”
“You do,” I assured him.
Then he spoke, quickly, to the point, and in a way that left no doubt as to how he felt. “She turned me off,” he said, “because I hadn’t enough money. Left me in no doubt about how she felt and how much she valued what I offered her. That didn’t seem to count. The fact that my salary is modest did.” And after that he walked so fast that I almost had to run to keep up with him.
“If she were sick,” I said, “wouldn’t you stick to her, help her--do anything you could for her?”
I think he considered me an interfering chit, as I was, and hated me; but he couldn’t very well strangle me, and I could walk quite as fast as he, so he replied, crisply, coolly, as before, but replied: “Since it interests you,” he answered, “certainly.”
Then I explained that she was sick. I said she had lived in a place where money was thought most important, and among people who attached a false value to it. And I said that that had made her sick mentally and that he should give her a chance and help her through that quite as he would through anything that made her body as miserable. He stopped and faced me.
“She is changing,” I said. “She is sorry, and she has cried before me about you.”
He caught his breath and then said: “Oh, my dear!” But he wasn’t speaking to me, I knew, but to Evelyn.
“She’s at home,” I went on, “and alone, or will be, since you can order Amy off. And she will love seeing you. She has cared so much that I think that has kept her from getting over this cold. I know it.”
He didn’t speak, but gripped my hand, and then he turned and hurried back toward the place where we had met. And I knew where he went from there, before I got home, and Amy told me about it.
I went on feeling sort of silly. The whole thing had taken lots of nerve, and if I hadn’t cared so much for Evelyn I never would have done it. I hate explaining what I think about the values of love and things. It makes me feel wishy-washy. So I was glad to be diverted by meeting S. K. He was in his car, and leaned out and told me to get off the grass!
“Can’t you see the signs?” he asked, as I turned to see where the loud order came from.
“Get in here,” he ordered next, and then his chauffeur, who grins and seems more human than other people’s chauffeurs, helped me across the snow-bank, and I was by S. K. He asked me if I’d minded the heat, and how many vanity cases I expected Santa to give me, and then he said he had got me a present and that I’d better sit tight or he’d give it to the janitor.
I looked at his chauffeur’s uniform and asked him where he got his servants’ duds.
“Rogers Peet,” he replied. “Why?”
“You are too young to know, S. K.,” I replied. “All of them--Debson’s too?”
“All of them,” he answered.
I had found out one more thing. “How did your man cut himself?” I asked next.
“On a piece of Baron Stiegel glass, worse luck,” S. K. answered. I felt sorry, for that glass was manufactured by Baron Stiegel way back, ages ago. He lived in South-Eastern Pennsylvania, and the glass is interesting from the historic as well as artistic viewpoint. S. K. has lots of things of that sort that are interesting as well as beautiful.
“If you’ll go riding, we won’t go home,” said S. K. next.
I said I would go, and we turned toward Riverside Drive, which was lovelier than ever with the snow weighting down the boughs of the trees, and the banks of the Hudson glittering like white mountains across the way. Little tots, many of whom wore red coats, made bright spots in the snow, and their nurses added the black lines that have to be to make a perfect poster. I loved it and so did S. K.
Huge motors, with beautiful women in them, rolled softly with and by us, and some of the windows of the houses and apartments were beginning to be bright with early lights. We were quiet because it made you feel that way.
“I love this,” I whispered.
“My dear,” S. K. answered, “I do too.” Then he looked down at me, and I was warmed by the feeling that he liked me a great deal. He had begun, even at that time, to be quite as much a part of my life as Uncle Frank, who, in his funny, forgetting way, has been both mother and father to me ever since I can remember.
“Next summer,” said S. K., “I am going to Southampton when your aunt does, and I shall return to town when she does.”
“Uncle Archie may be jealous,” I answered, smiling.
S. K. started to speak, then stopped, rubbed his hands together, looked away from me, and frowned. I looked at the beautiful houses, the crowds, and the passing cars. The little stretch of park, the wonderful apartments, and the well-dressed people, made a picture, a picture of happiest, smoothest-living New York. It was pleasant to look on.
“Suppose,” suggested S. K., “we go in up here and have tea? I imagine you’ve had it once, but I also suppose that hasn’t dimmed your bright young appetite.”
I giggled, for it hadn’t. And after we had driven some distance more, we turned in a big house that is set high on a lot of ground where you can get very good tea and wonderful things to eat between drinks. We had scones, and marmalade, and little cakes that were about as big as big candies and which, like those, came in cases. I ate quite a lot. S. K. telephoned aunt about where I was, and we lingered.
I grew confidential after I ate, and told S. K. about Evelyn and Mr. Apthorpe. I hoped he would think it was all right, and he did. He said he wished someone would Cook Tour his affairs like that, and something honestly hurt under my left ribs.
“Yours?” I said, before I knew that I was going to speak.
“Think I’m too old?” he asked, in a queer, tight way.
I said it wasn’t that, and then I told the truth. “I suppose,” I said, “I am a pig, but I would feel awfully if you got married. I don’t know how I could stand it, S. K. I am awfully used to you and your friendship.”
He leaned across the table, covered my hand with his, squeezed it in a way that reassured me, and said: “I promise I won’t get married until you say I can. How about that? You know I am to choose your husband, so your having a little say is only fair.”
I laughed, for I’d forgotten about that.
Then S. K. said: “I beg pardon, Nat; I seem to have borrowed your hand. Perhaps you’ll want it to-morrow.” After which he folded my fingers up and laid my hand in my lap. I love his nonsense.
We had a good time, and he told me about Madam Jumel’s marriage. The talk had run in that direction, and that, I suppose, started it. . . . It seemed that she was a great flirt, and I think M. Jumel did not think she would make a good wife, for although he made love to her, S. K. said, he did not ask her to marry him. But on one occasion, when Stephen Jumel returned to his home after a little absence, he found that Eliza Bowen was ill and, the doctor said, dying. He went to her bedside, where the lady besought him to marry her. S. K. didn’t tell me why she wanted to be married so much, but I suppose she wanted “?‘Mrs.’ on her tombstone,” as we say in Queensburg. Anyway, M. Jumel was so touched that the priest then and there married them, and--the next day Eliza Bowen Jumel arose from her bed, and went driving in high state. She wasn’t really sick at all!
“What do you think of that, Nat?” S. K. asked.
I said I didn’t think it was entirely upright.
“Right, my dear,” said S. K., reaching for a buttered scone, and then he went on to tell me how she had robbed Stephen Jumel, who, during his absence abroad, had given her power to administer his affairs. And how, when he came back, he found himself a poor old man and a dependent. I said it was sad, and I hated Madam Jumel’s being buried by one of the most beautiful drives in all America, and having a splendid monument (we had seen it before we had tea), while her husband’s grave is in one corner of a little churchyard, neglected and worn, and so hurt by time that only “Stephen” is left to remind one of a name that once was famous. Heavy trucks lumber by that spot, and very poor people hurry past, while their children, half clothed and hungry, scream over their games, which must be played on the kerb.
“S. K.,” I said, “I wish it might have been different.”
“He bought that plot,” S. K. answered, “when he married Eliza Bowen. You would not understand, but she had done things that made good people distrust her. You know, hard as it may seem, Nat, you usually give yourself the dose that makes the pain.”
I knew that, and said so.
Then I asked why people, such great people, should have come to visit a woman who was not all that she should have been.
S. K. said they didn’t, and that the tales of her entertaining were largely fictitious--meaning made up. He said that during the time the Bonapartes were in America she was abroad, so that plainly she did not entertain them; and in other cases dates prove the same tale. Abroad, he said, it was different. That broken French from an American was quaint, while bad English from an American was common, and made the speaker so. And he said that some of her little girl phrases, which were not nice, had clung to her, and, with what people knew of her here, spoiled her chances for social success. He said her own niece, who lived with her, said she never entertained the Bonapartes, and was much alone. But--she kept a table with glass and bits of silver on it, spread, she said, as it had been for the dinner she gave to Joseph Bonaparte.
Then S. K. asked me if I’d ever read “Great Expectations,” and told me of an old woman in there whose lover had failed to appear at the wedding, and how she wore her wedding clothes for years after and let the wedding feast stay on the table untouched.
“Rodents crawled from the cake,” said S. K., “dust lay on all the china, cobwebs hung from the candlesticks, and--she waited. And I think Dickens visited America before he wrote this. Do you suppose he saw Madam Jumel’s table and got his idea there?”
I said I didn’t know, but it interested me a lot.
Then, because it was getting late, we had to start off. I didn’t want to go because I’d had a good time with S. K. and hated to end it. I always do have a good time when I’m with him, and I always hate to have to stop!