"Unfortunately, Mr. Hunt," said Miss Goucher, "that is what I cannot do."
"May I ask why?"
"Society would not permit me," answered Miss Goucher.
"Please explain," I gasped.
"Sonia will cause a great deal of suffering in the world," said Miss Goucher, the color on her cheek bones deepening, while she avoided my glance. "For herself--and others. In my opinion--which I am aware is not widely shared--she should be placed in a lethal chamber and painlessly removed. We are learning to "swat the fly,"" continued Miss Goucher, "because it benefits no one and spreads many human ills. Some day we shall learn to swat--other things." Calmly she rose to take her leave.
Excitedly eager, I sprang up to detain her.
"Don"t go, Miss Goucher! Your views are really most interesting--though, as you say, not widely accepted. Certainly not by me. Your plan of a lethal chamber for weak sisters and brothers strikes me as--well, drastic. Do sit down."
Again Miss Goucher perched primly upright on the outer edge of the chair beside my own. "I felt bound to state my views truthfully," she said, "since you asked for them. But I never intrude them upon others. I"m not a social rebel, Mr. Hunt. I lack self-confidence for that. When I differ from the received opinion I always suspect that I am quite wrong.
Probably I am in this case. But I think society would agree with me that Sonia is not a fit maid for Susan."
"Beyond a shadow of doubt," I a.s.sented. "But may I ask on what grounds you suspect Sonia?"
"It is certainly your right," replied Miss Goucher; "but if you insist upon an answer I shall have to give notice."
"Then I shall certainly not insist."
"Thank you, Mr. Hunt," said Miss Goucher, rising once more. "I appreciate this." And she walked from the room.
It was the next afternoon that Susan burst into my study without knocking--a breach of manners which she had recently learned to conquer, so the irruption surprised me. But I noted instantly that Susan"s agitation had carried her far beyond all thought for trifles. Never had I seen her like this. Her whole being was vibrant with emotional stress.
"Ambo!" she cried, all but slamming the door behind her. "Sonia mustn"t go! I won"t let her go! You and Miss Goucher may think what you please--I won"t, Ambo! It"s wicked! You don"t want Sonia to be like Tilly Jaretski, do you?"
"Like Tilly Jaretski?" My astonishment was so great that I babbled the unfamiliar name merely to gain time, collect my senses.
"Yes!" urged Susan, almost leaping to my side, and seizing my arm with tense fingers. "She"ll be just like Tilly was, along State Street--after her baby came. Tilly wasn"t a bit like Pearl, Ambo; and Sonia isn"t either! But she"s going to have a baby, too, Ambo, like Tilly."
With a wrench of my entire nervous system I, in one agonizing second, completely dislocated the prejudices of a lifetime, and rose to the situation confronting me. O Hillhouse Avenue, right at both ends! How little you had prepared me for this precocious knowledge of life--knowledge that utterly degrades or most wonderfully saves--which these children, out toward the wrong end of the Birch Streets of the world, drink in almost with their mothers" milk! How far I, a grown man--a cultured, sophisticated man--must travel, Susan, even to begin to equal your simple acceptance of naked, ugly fact--sheer fact--seen, smelt, heard, tasted! How far--how far!
"Susan," I said gravely, "does Miss Goucher know about Sonia?"
"I don"t know. I suppose so. I haven"t seen her yet. When Sonia came to me, crying--I ran straight in here!"
"And how long have _you_ known?"
"Over a week. Sonia told me all about it, Ambo. Count Dimbrovitski got her in trouble. She loved him, Ambo--her way. She doesn"t any more.
Sonia can"t love anybody long; he can"t, either. That"s why his wife sent Sonia off. Sonia says she knows her husband"s like that, but so long as she can hush things up, she doesn"t care. Sonia says she has a lover herself, and Count Dim doesn"t care much either. Oh, Ambo--how _stuffy_ some people are! I don"t mean Sonia. She"s just pitiful--like Tilly. But those others--they"re different--I can feel it! Oh, how _Artemis_ must hate them, Ambo!"
Susan"s tense fingers relaxed, slipping from my arm; she slid down to the floor, huddled, and leaning against the padded side of my chair buried her face in her hands.
Very quietly I rose, not to disturb her, and crossing to the interphone requested Miss Goucher"s presence. My thoughts raced crazily on. In advance of Miss Goucher"s coming I had dramatized my interview with her in seven different and unsatisfactory ways. When she at last entered, my temple pulses were beating and my tongue was stiff and dry. Susan, except for her shaken shoulders, had not stirred.
"Miss Goucher," I managed to begin, "shut the door, please.... You see this poor child----?"
Miss Goucher saw. Over her harsh, positive features fell a sort of transforming veil. It seemed to me suddenly--if for that moment only--that Miss Goucher was very beautiful.
"If you wouldn"t mind," she suggested, "leaving her with me?"
Well, I had not in advance dramatized our meeting in this way. In all the seven scenes that had flashed through me, I had stood, an unquestioned star, at the center of the stage. I had not foreseen an exit. But I most humbly and gratefully accepted one now.
Precisely what took place, what words were said there, in my study, following my humble exit, I have never learned, either from Miss Goucher or from Susan. I know only that from that hour forth the bond between them became what sentimentalists fondly suppose the relationship between mother and daughter must always be--what, alas, it so rarely, but then so beautifully, is.
I date from that hour Miss Goucher"s abandonment of her predilection for the lethal chamber; at least, she never spoke of it again. And Sonia stayed with us. Her boy was born in my house, and there for three happy years was nourished and shamelessly spoiled; at the end of which time Sonia found a husband in the person of young Jack Palumbo, unquestionably the pick of all our Hillhouse Avenue chauffeurs. Their marriage caused a brief scandal in the neighborhood, but was soon accepted as an authentic and successful fact.
Chance and change are not always villains, you observe; the temperamental Sonia has grown stout and placid, and has increased the world"s legitimate population by three. Nevertheless, it is the consensus of opinion that little Ivan, her first-born, is the golden arrow in her quiver--an opinion in which Jack Palumbo delightedly, if rather surprisingly, concurs.
And so much for Sonia.... Let the curtain quietly descend. When it rises again, six years will have pa.s.sed; good years--and therefore unrecorded.
Your scribe, Susan, is now nearing forty; and you---- Great heavens, is it possible! Can you be "going on"--twenty?
Yes, dear---- You are.
THE THIRD CHAPTER
I
IT was October; the year, 1913. Susan, Miss Goucher and I had just returned from Liverpool on the good ship "Lusitania"--there was a good ship "Lusitania" in those days--after a delightful summer spent in Italy and France. Susan and I entirely agree that the season for Italy is midsummer. Italy is not Italy until she has drunk deep of the sun; until a haze of whitest dust floats up from the slow hoofs of her white oxen along Umbrian or Tuscan roads. You will never get from her churches all they can give unless they have been to you as shadows of great rocks in a weary land. To step from reverberating glare to vast cool dimness--ah, that is to know at last the meaning of sanctuary!
But to step from a North River pier into a cynical taxi, solely energized by our great American principle of "Take a chance!"--to be b.u.mped and slithered by that energizing principle across the main traffic streams of impatient New York--that is to reawaken to all the doubt and distraction, the implacable multiplicity of a scientifically disordered world!
New Haven was better; Hillhouse Avenue preserving especially--through valorous prodigies of rejection--much of its ancient, slightly disdainful, studiously inconspicuous calm.
Phil Farmer was waiting for us at the doorstep. For all his inclusive greeting, his warm, welcoming smile, he looked older, did Phil, leaner somehow, more finely drawn. There was a something hungry about him--something in his eyes. But if Susan, who notices most things, noted it, she did not speak of her impression to me. She almost hugged Phil as she jumped out to greet him and dragged him with her up the steps to the door.
And now, if this portion of Susan"s history is to be truthfully recorded, certain facts may as well be set down at once, clearly, in due order, without shame.
1. Phil Farmer was, by this time, hopelessly in love with Susan.
2. So was Maltby Phar.
3. So was I.
It should now be possible for a modest but intelligent reader to follow the approaching pages without undue fatigue.
II
Susan never kept a diary, she tells me, but she had, like most beginning authors, the habit of scribbling things down, which she never intended to keep, and then could seldom bring herself to destroy. To a writer all that his pen leaves behind it seems sacred; it is, I treacherously submit, a private grief to any of us to blot a line. Such is our vanity.
However inept the work which we force ourselves or are prevailed upon to destroy, the unhappy doubt always lingers: "If I had only saved it? One can"t be sure? Perhaps posterity----?"
Susan, thank G.o.d, was not and probably is not exempt from this folly. It enables me from this time forward to present certain pa.s.sages--mere sc.r.a.ps and jottings--from her notebooks, which she has not hesitated to turn over to me.