From the very first minute, Tom"s Aunt Elizabeth made me conscious of her disapproval. In after years I won the old lady"s affection and real respect, but I never spent a completely happy hour in her presence.
The night we arrived she gave me a formal dinner. Some dozen additional guests dropped in later, and I was bewildered by new faces and strange names. Later in the evening I noticed a distinguished-looking middle-aged gentleman standing alone just outside the drawing-room door.
Hurrying out, I invited him to come in. He inquired courteously if there was anything he could do for me.
"Yes, indeed," I a.s.sured him. "Come in and talk to me." He looked shy and surprised. I insisted. Then Tom"s aunt called me and, drawing me hastily into a corner, demanded why I was inviting a servant into her drawing-room.
"Servant! He looks like a senator," I protested. "He"s dressed exactly like every other man at the party and he looks twice as important as most of them."
"Didn"t you notice he addressed you as "Madam"?" pursued Aunt Elizabeth.
"But it "s perfectly proper to call a married woman "Madam."
Foreigners always do," I defended.
"Can"t you tell a servant when you see one?" inquired the old lady icily.
I begged to know how one could. All Boston was summed up in her answer: "You are supposed to know the other people."
Tom"s wife could have drowned in a thimble.
The third day of our visit, we were at the dinner table, when I saw Aunt Elizabeth"s face change--for the worse. Her head went up higher and her upper lip drew longer. Finally she turned to me.
"Why do you cut your meat like a dog"s dinner?" she snapped.
Tom"s protesting exclamation did not stop her.
I laid my knife and fork on my plate and folded my hands in my lap to hide their trembling.
Time may dim many hurts, but with the last flicker of intelligence I shall remember that scene. Even then, in a flash, I saw the symbolism of it.
On one side--rare mahogany, shining silver, deft servants, napkins to rumple, leisure for the niceties of life. On the other hand--a log cabin, my tired mother with new babies always coming, father slaving to homestead a claim and push civilization a little farther over our American continent.
A great tenderness for my parents filled my heart and overflowed in my eyes. I have, I confess, had moments of bitterness toward them. But that was not one of them.
"I think I can tell you," I answered, as quietly as I could. "It "s very simple. I was the first baby, and mother cut up my food for me.
After a while she cut up food for two babies. By the time the third came, I had to do my own cutting. Naturally, I did it just as mother had. Then I began to help cut up food for the other babies. It "s a baby habit. And I must now learn to cut one bite at a time like a civilized grown person."
Even Aunt Elizabeth was silenced. But Tom rose from the table, swearing. My father would not have permitted a cowpuncher to use such language before my mother. But I loved Tom for it.
However, I did not sleep that night. Next morning Tom"s Aunt Elizabeth apologized, and for Back Bay was really unbending.
Some days later we returned to New York, and I thought my troubles were over for a time. But the first night Tom came home full of excitement.
He had been appointed to the diplomatic corps, and we were to sail for England within a month!
The news struck chill terror to my heart. With so much still to learn in my native America, what on earth should I do in English society?
II.
More than two months pa.s.sed after the night my husband announced his foreign appointment before we sailed for England.
I planned to study and to have long talks with him about the customs of fashionable and diplomatic Europe, but alas! I reckoned without the friends and pretended friends who claim the time of a man of Tom"s importance. Besides, he and I had so many other things to discuss.
So the sailing time approached, and then he announced that we were to be presented at court! I was thrilled half with fear and half with joy.
I remembered from my reading of history that some of England"s kings had not spoken English and that French had been the court language. I visited a bookstore and purchased what was recommended as an easy road to French, and spent all morning learning to say, "l"orange est un fruit." I read the instructions for placing the tongue and puckering the lips and repeated les and las until I was dizzy. Then I looked through our bookcases for a life of Benjamin Franklin. I knew he had gone to court and "played with queens."
But the great statesman-author-orator gave me no guide to correct form or English social customs. Instead I grew so interested in the history of his work in England and France and in his inspiring achievement in obtaining recognition and credit for the United States that dinner time arrived before I realized I had not discovered what language was spoken at court, nor what one talked about, nor if one talked at all.
Tom roared when I made my confession. With his boyish good humor he promised to answer all my questions on board ship.
So, without a care in those delicious days that followed, I wandered down Sixth Avenue to New York"s then most correct shops, buying clothes and clothes and clothes. I bought practical and impractical gifts for the twins back in Wisconsin and for all the family and those good friends who had helped me through Madison.
The week before we sailed my husband said, out of a clear sky: "Be sure you have the right clothes, Mary. The English are a conservative lot."
Suddenly I was conscious again that I did not know the essential things the wife of a diplomat ought to know--what to wear and when, a million and one tremendous social trifles.
The moment our magnificent liner left the dock I heaved a sigh of relief. Tom would be mine for two whole weeks, and all the questions I had saved up would be answered. That evening he announced: "We don"t dress for dinner the first night out."
"Dress for dinner?" I asked. "What do you mean?"
And then very gently he gave me my first lesson. I had never seen anything bigger than a ferry-boat. How could I guess that even on an ocean liner we did not leave formality behind? The "party dresses", so carefully selected, the long, rich velvet cape I had thought outrageously extravagant, and the satin slippers and the suede--I had packed them all carefully in the trunk and sent them to the hold of the ship. But, with the aid of a little cash, the steward finally produced my treasure trunk, and thereafter I dressed for dinner.
The two weeks I had expected my husband to give me held no quiet hours.
There is no such thing, except when one is seasick, as being alone aboard a ship. Tom was popular, good at cards and deck games, always ready to play. And the fourth day out I was too ill to worry about the customs at the Court of St. James.
It was not until just before we reached England that I began to feel myself again. I stood on deck, thrilled with the tall ships and the steamers, the fishing smacks and the smaller craft in Southampton harbor.
"What will be the first thing you do in London?" somebody asked me.
"Go to Mayfair to find the home of Becky Sharp," I answered. Becky Sharp was as much a part of English history to me as Henry VIII or Anne Boleyn or William the Conqueror. When my husband and I were alone he said: "I think they have picked out No. 21 Curzon Street as the house where Becky Sharp is supposed to have lived. But what a funny thing for you to want to see first!"
I remembered what old Lord Steyne had said to Becky: "You poor little earthen pipkin. You want to swim down the stream with great copper kettles. All women are alike. Everybody is striving for what is not worth the having."
I was quite sure I did not want to drift down the stream with copper kettles. I only wanted to be with Tom, to see England with him, to enjoy Dr. Johnson"s haunts, to go to the "Cheddar Cheese" and the Strand, to Waterloo Bridge, and down the road the Romans built before England was England.
I wanted to see the world without the world seeing me. In my heart was no desire to be a copper kettle. But I had been cast into the stream, and down it I must go, like a little fungus holding to the biggest copper kettle I knew.
I told my husband this. It was the first time he had been really irritated with me. "Why do you worry about these things?" he protested.
"You have a good head and a good education. You are the loveliest woman in England. Be your own natural self and the English will love you."
But I remembered another occasion when he had told me to be my own natural sweet self.
"How about what happened to Becky?" I asked.
Tom went into a rage. "Why do you insist on comparing yourself with that little ------!" The word he used was an ugly one. I did not speak to him again until after we had pa.s.sed the government inspectors.
I shall never forget my first day in London, the old, quiet city where everybody seemed so comfortable and easy-going. There was no show, no pretense. The people in the shops and on the street bore the earmarks of thrift. I understood where New England got its spirit.