FELIX stood still for a moment with a lemon suspended in mid-squeeze.
“I know just how you feel,” said the old gentleman. “At such a moment as this, a father-in-law would be just the last straw!”
Felix laughed, and shook the extended hand. “Did I give away my dismay as plainly as all that?” he asked.
“I don’t blame you,” said the old gentleman, taking off his hat and overcoat, and sitting down. “Go right on with what you were doing, and we’ll talk. I feel rather well acquainted with you from what I’ve already heard about you. No, Rose-Ann didn’t say much, but I sort of always know what she’s up to. The marriage wasn’t exactly a surprise to me. And I shouldn’t have thought of coming down here to bother you, except that I thought it would be better for me to come than one of the boys. You see, I’ll have to report to them that it’s all right, or they’ll go on thinking that Rose-Ann has married some perfectly disreputable person.” He smiled.
“How do you know,” Felix asked, laughingly, “that I’m not a disreputable person!”
“Well,” said Rose-Ann’s father gravely, taking out a cigar, “perhaps you are. Will you have one of these? No? They’re very good Havana cigars—I can recommend them; oh, I see you smoke cigarettes.... Perhaps you are a disreputable person. But of a certain type that I can very well sympathize with, because I belong to it myself. Impractical. Yes, I can see you’re that. Not interested in making money. All that sort of thing. Yes, I’m afraid my sons would consider you a poor match for Rose-Ann. What they don’t understand is that she was bound to marry that 202sort if she married anybody. I’ll have to misrepresent you when I get back home. I’ll tell them that you’re an enterprising young newspaper man. You won’t mind that?”
“I should be delighted to have somebody think that of me,” said Felix.
“Well, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t.... I’ll be a little sad when I get home, and tell them that I’m afraid Rose-Ann will never be really happy with you—that you are too practical to appreciate the poetic side of her nature. Then they’ll be convinced that it’s all right.... I suppose it sounds odd to you, my speaking this way of my own sons?”
“Well—yes,” said Felix, “it does rather! But it’s refreshing.”
“I haven’t a scrap of family sentiment,” said Rose-Ann’s father. “I am interested in people only as individuals. And I must say that I have been cursed with four of the most practical and unimaginative sons that a ne’er-do-well father ever had. They will all end up as millionaires, I’m sure. By the way, I hope you’ve no prejudice against preachers?”
“Not your kind, anyway!” Felix laughed.
“I was reading a book the other day,” said the old man, “about women in the Middle Ages. It said that women often went into convents then, not because they felt particularly religious, but because they wanted to escape from the humdrum ways of ordinary life. A woman who went into a convent might become—a scholar, a ruler, a politician, the peer of princes! She could have friendships with distinguished men. She could be, in a sense that her married sister wasn’t, free.... And I thought how well all that applied to myself. If I had lived in a Catholic country, I would probably have gone into a monastery, and written a history of something. I did the next best thing, it seems to me now. I went into a profession where nobody is expected to succeed. I escaped from the bedevilment of business; I started out in business, you know, and left it for the ministry. Now I can be a little odd, and nobody minds very much. I am very fortunate, I think. The pulpit is a wonderful refuge. For instance—do you like to drink?”
203“No—not really,” Felix said.
“No, I thought not,” said the old gentleman. “But you have to. You will have to consume your share of that enormous quantity of vile-tasting medicine you are preparing for your guests. Now, I am free from any such social necessity. It’s an enormous relief.”
Felix thought of his Eddie Silver parties in the past, and all the parties he seemed committed to in the future—and it seemed to him that Rose-Ann’s father was indeed very fortunate.
“I assume,” said the old man, “that you don’t particularly relish the idea of this party, anyway?”
“No, to tell the truth, I don’t,” said Felix.
“Of course not. What sane human being would want to spend an evening talking to forty people without saying anything to any of them? And yet ordinary people are supposed to like that sort of thing.”
“Rose-Ann promises that this will be the last one of this kind.”
“Hold her to her promise, young man!” said Rose-Ann’s father. “And be stern about it. Be ruthless. Rose-Ann,” he observed reflectively, “means well. But after all, she’s a woman. And when you know as much about women as I do, you will know that they are the natural ally of the world against the human soul. Now I have always had my sermon as an excuse for getting out of everything I didn’t want to do. I always managed to make the writing of that sermon last me nearly all week. I locked myself in my study, and let the world rush past outside. In my study I could read and dream and think; I could be by myself. Aren’t you going to write a novel or something? A play, I believe it was Rose-Ann spoke of.”
“I’m—thinking about something of the sort,” said Felix. It was true, he reflected, he had not been able to get any writing done lately! One could not write with parties going on all the time....
“Well, you’d better get down to work on it right away. And get a room of your own somewhere to do it in. You’re 204just married, and your head is full of all sorts of romantic nonsense about Rose-Ann, who is a very fine young woman, but, after all, a woman; and the time to establish your right to be by yourself some of the time is at the very beginning. I see you have two desks up there in front. Do you expect to work there?”
“Yes. That one is Rose-Ann’s—”
“And the other is yours. And when you are in the middle of a sentence, you find that Rose-Ann has come over and put her arms around your neck. Very natural. Very charming. But how in the name of Prince Beelzebub are you going to get any work done under those circumstances?”
Felix smiled. It certainly was odd, to have one’s wife’s father take your side against her. But it was easy to see that he was thinking of his own case. He had doubtless had to lock himself in his study to be free from the encroachments of domesticity. But Rose-Ann was different; Rose-Ann did not come over and kiss him in the middle of a sentence....
“I see you don’t take my warnings seriously,” said the old man. “Well, don’t say I didn’t do my best for you. Here she is now.”
Rose-Ann came in, crying out, “Dad!”—and running up to him flung her arms about him. “You didn’t tell me you were coming!”
Her father set her on his knees.
“No, Rosie, I didn’t—and I see I’ve intruded on a wild party. But if you’ll not tell anybody I’m a preacher they won’t know it. I won’t spoil your party!”
“It’s only our house-warming, and of course I’m glad you came. How do you like my husband?” She looked proudly at Felix.
“We’ve become very well acquainted,” said her father. “I’ve been warning him against you.”
“And you’ve been getting cigar-ashes all over my nice clean floor, too,” said Rose-Ann. “Why will you never, never learn to use an ash-tray?”
“I’m sorry, my dear,” said her father with a twinkle at 205Felix, “but I thought this was a studio, and that people in studios did just as they pleased.”
“Well,” said Rose-Ann, “if you’re not going to be a preacher tonight, you can help Felix get things ready for the cocktails. I have a million sandwiches to fix, myself. Take off your coat and put on this apron. How do you like our studio?”
“I was very much impressed by those desks up in the front there,” he said disingenuously, smiling at Felix.
“Yes, that’s where Felix is going to write his play, and I’m going to do—I don’t know just what, yet. But isn’t it all—wonderful, father!”
“Wonderful!” said Rose-Ann’s father.
2
Whether it was the effect of that talk or not, all Felix’s recent social sophistication had vanished utterly, and the party passed after the usual fashion of such events to a shy and bewildered person. He made desperate efforts to remember people’s names, and succeeded once or twice; at other times Rose-Ann intervened and performed that painful feat for him; and once when he saw two people beside him who had not yet been introduced, and whose names he knew as well as he knew his own, but which he could not to save his life think of, he slunk away in guilty crimson shame. An old lady—it seemed to him that he was a favourite prey of old ladies—got him into a corner and talked to him for a long time about telepathy, and the life beyond the grave. He could not recall ever having seen her before, and he wondered what she was doing at his house-warming. “Yes,” he said earnestly to her—“yes!” So convincingly, that Rose-Ann, who wanted him to meet Professor Hedding of the University of Chicago, left him alone until at last she caught his piteous glance of appeal and came and bore him away. Howard Morgan was there, at ease as always, his leonine grey head the centre of a phantasmagoria which he seemed to understand, to rule with a glance, a smile, a word. He was enjoying it all.
206“No,” Felix said to himself, “I shall never be like that!”
His father-in-law wandered up to him as he stood helplessly aside. He seemed to Felix to be about to ask, “And is this the kind of life you are going to lead?” But instead, he remarked, “Your friend Mr. Bangs is a very interesting young man. We had a good talk. I like the way his mind works.”
It struck Felix as the oddest aspect of his fantastic fortunes that he should have a father-in-law—out of all possible fathers-in-law!—who so heartily approved of him, approved of his very weakness, and of his maddest friends! What he might have expected was: “If I were you, I don’t think I’d see too much of that young man—he has queer ideas.” But queer ideas, his own and Clive’s, were, it seemed, not merely tolerable, but commendable....
A little before midnight, the Rev. Mr. Prentiss took his daughter and son-in-law aside and said, “I’m getting sleepy, so I’m going to my train and try to get a little sleep between now and morning. No, don’t you bother about seeing me off. But you must come and visit us in Springfield. Sometime, I mean—no hurry—just whenever you feel like it.” He shook hands with Felix. “Do,” he said. Rose-Ann kissed him, and he slipped quietly away.
“Father likes you,” she whispered.
“He’s lovely,” said Felix.
“He told me—”
“What?”
“Never mind. I’ll tell you some other time.”
“What?” Felix repeated.
“Oh, I guess the same things he told you. He warned you against me. And he warned me, too.”
“Against me?”
“No. Against myself. Come, we must say good-bye to these people.”