clenching her hand, "will get me. But he will not come."
Then I walked with her to the door, and she bent over me, and whispered something about my being a "blessed comfort" to her, and went away. Ah, Tabby, my dear, it is worth while being an Old Maid to be a blessed comfort to anybody. But I would just like to ask you, as a cat of intelligence, what in the world I did for her!
Imagine some man making that girl care for him so much. For, of course, it is somebody. A girl does not say such things about the abstract man.
I was in an uplifted state of mind all day, as I am always after a talk with Rachel, and when Percival came in the evening, I felt that I could deluge him with my gathered sentiment, and he would be receptive. Besides, Percival has a positive genius for understanding. I did not know it, however, this morning. I seldom know as much in the morning as I do at night.
Percival approves of sentiment. He said once that a life which had principle and sentiment needed little else, for principle was to stand upon, and sentiment was to beautify with. He said this after I had told him rather apologetically that I wished there was more sentiment in the world, because I liked it. Is it strange that I like Percival? You can"t help admiring people who approve of you.
Percival is a genius. People in general do not recognize this fact. He is an inarticulate genius. Men feel that he is in some occult way different from them, yet they do not know just how. Nor will they ever take the trouble to study out a problem in human nature, either in man or woman, unless they are philosophers.
Women care for Percival in proportion to their intuitions. You must comprehend him synthetically. You cannot dissect him. With generous appreciation and sympathetic encouragement, Percival"s genius would become articulate. To discover it he must needs marry--but he must wait for the hundredth woman. This, of course, he will not do. If he can find a Flossy, he will go down on his knees to her, when she ought to be on hers to him; metaphorical knees, in this case.
I am very much afraid he has found her. He is in love. You can always tell when a man is in love, Tabby, especially if he is not the lovering kind and has never been troubled in that way before. The best kind of love has to be so intuitive that it often is grandly, heroically awkward. Depend upon it, Tabby, a man who is dainty and pretty and unspeakably smooth when he makes love to you, has had altogether too much practice.
Percival knows that he is in love--that is one great step in the right direction. But he is in that first partly alarmed, partly curious frame of mind that a man would be in who touched his broken arm for the first time to see how much it hurt. Whoever she is, he loves her deeply and thinks she never can care for him. He did not tell me this. If he thought that I knew it, he would wonder how in the world I found it out. Women are born lovers. They have to do the bulk of the loving all through the world. I told Percival so. At first he seemed surprised; then he said that it was true. I believe some men could go through life without loving anybody on earth. But the woman never lived who could do it. A woman must love something--even if she hasn"t anything better to love than a pug-dog or herself.
"Why aren"t women the choosers?" said Percival seriously. The same question twice in one day, Tabby. "Whenever I think of understanding the question of love, I wish for a woman"s intuitions. Women know so much about it. They absorb the whole question at a glance. But, with so many different kinds of women, how is a man to know anything?"
I always liked Percival, but a woman never likes a man so well as when he acknowledges his helplessness in her particular line of knowledge, and throws himself on her mercy. Mentally, I at once began to feel motherly towards Percival, and clucked around him like an old hen. He went on to say that men often are not so blind that they cannot see the prejudices and complexities of a woman"s nature, but they are not const.i.tuted to understand them by intuition as women understand men. "The masculine mind," he said, "is but ill-attuned to the subtle harmonies of the feminine heart."
I was secretly very much pleased at this remark, but I made myself answer as became an Old Maid, just to make him continue without self-consciousness. If I had blushed and thanked him, he would have gone home.
"They set these things down to the natural curiousness and contrariness of women, and often despise what they cannot comprehend."
He answered me with the heightened consciousness and slight irritation of a man who has been in that fault, but has seen and mended it.
"All men do not. Still, how can they help it at times?"
Then, Tabby, I went a-sailing. I launched out on my favorite theme.
"Men must needs study women. Often the terror with which some men regard these--to us--perfectly transparent complexities, could be avoided if they would a.n.a.lyze the cause with but half the patience they display in the case of an ailing trotter. But no; either they edge carefully away from such dangers as they previously have experienced, or, if they blunder into new ones, they give the woman a sealskin and trust to time to heal the breach."
I thought of the Asburys when I said that. But Percival ruminated upon it, as if it touched his own case. A very good thing about Percival is that he does not think he knows everything. It encourages me to believe in his genius. To rouse him from a brown-study over this Flossy girl, I said rather recklessly,
"I should like to be a man for a while, in order to make love to two or three women. I would do it in a way which should not shock them with its coa.r.s.eness or starve them with its poverty. As it is now, most women deny themselves the expression of the best part of their love, because they know it will be either a puzzle or a terror to their lovers."
Percival was vitally interested at once.
"Is that really so?" he asked. "Do you suppose any of them withhold anything from such a fear?" His face was so uplifted that I plunged on, thoroughly in the dark, but, like Barkis, "willin"." If I could be of use to him in an emergency, I was only too happy.
"Men never realize the height of the pedestal where women in love place them, nor do they know with how many perfections they are invested nor how religiously women keep themselves deceived on the subject. They cannot comprehend the succession of little shocks which is caused by the real man coming in contact with the ideal. And if they did understand, they would think that such mere trifles should not affect the genuine article of love, and that women simply should overlook foibles, and go on loving the damaged article just as blindly as before. But what man could view his favorite marble tumbling from its pedestal continually, and losing first a finger, then an arm, then a nose, and would go on setting it up each time, admiring and reverencing in the mutilated remains the perfect creation which first enraptured him? He wouldn"t take the trouble to fill up the nicks and glue on the lost fingers as women do to their idols. He wouldn"t even try to love it as he used to do. When it began to look too battered up, he would say, "Here, put this thing in the cellar and let"s get it out of the way.""
Percival listened with specific interest, and admitted its truth with a fair-mindedness surprising even in him.
"Do you suppose it is possible for a man ever to thoroughly understand a woman?" he asked, with a retrospective slowness, directed, I was sure, towards that empty-headed sweetheart of his.
"I really do not know," I said honestly. "I think if he tried with all his might he could."
"Do you think--you know me better than any one else does--do you think _I_ could, if I gave my whole mind to it?"
"You, if anybody." I answered him with the occasional absolute truthfulness which occurs between a man and a woman when they are completely lifted out of themselves. Something more than mere pleasure shone in his eyes. It was as if I had reached his soul.
"If no man ever has been all that a woman in love really believes him, the best a man could do would be to take care that she never found out her mistake," he said slowly.
"Exactly," I said; "you are getting on. It is only another way of making yourself live up to her ideal of you."
"Supposing after all, that the woman I love will have none of me," he said, unconsciously slipping from the third person to the first.
"I wouldn"t admit even the possibility if I were a man. I would besiege the fortress. I would sit on her front doorstep until she gave in. Don"t ask her to have you. Tell her you are going to have her whether or no," I cried, thinking of Rachel"s words. He looked so encouraged that I am afraid I have sent him post-haste to the Flossy girl, and gotten him into life-long trouble. But I had gone too far. I quite hurried, in my accidental endeavor to shipwreck him.
"Men do not understand these things, because they will not give time enough to them. Real love-making requires the patience, the tenderness, the sympathy which women alone possess in the highest degree. Possibly she loves you deeply, only you do not believe it. Gauged by a woman"s love, many men love, marry, and die, without even approximating the real grand pa.s.sion themselves, or comprehending that which they have inspired, for no one but a woman can fathom a woman"s love."
I couldn"t help going on after I started, for he was thinking of the other woman, and looking at me in a way that would have made my heart turn over, if I hadn"t been an Old Maid, and known that his look was not for me.
Then he ground my rings into my hand until I nearly shrieked with the pain, and said, "G.o.d bless you!" very hoa.r.s.ely, and dashed out of the house before I could pull myself together. _I_ say so too. G.o.d bless me, what have I done? I"ve sent him straight to that Flossy girl. I feel it.
I"ve smoothed out something between them. I have accidentally made him articulate, and articulation in such a man as Percival is overpowering. He is a murdered man, and mine is the hand that slew him.
Tabby, old maids are a public nuisance, not to say dangerous. They ought to be suppressed.
I wonder if he will burst in upon her with that look upon his face!
V
THE HEART OF A COQUETTE
"Strange, that a film of smoke can blot a star!"
He did. And the woman was--Rachel. Tabby, I never was better pleased with myself in my life. I love old maids. I think that whenever they are accidental they are perfectly lovely. But _what_ a risk I ran!
I did not know a thing about it until I received their wedding-cards. It was just like Rachel not to tell me, and it was insufferably stupid in me not to use the few wits I am possessed of, and see how matters stood. But my fears and tremors were that Frankie Taliaferro would get him, so I have watched her all this time. Percival laughed almost scornfully when I told him this, and said I had been barking up the wrong tree. I retaliated by saying that if they had been ordinary lovers, I never could have made such a mistake, and they took it as a great compliment. When I consider the general run of engaged people, I am inclined to agree with them.
Everybody seems to think they are making an experiment of marriage, because they are so much alike. But, then, doesn"t every one who marries at all, Jew or Gentile, black or white, bond or free, make an experiment?
I myself have no fear as to how the Percival experiment will turn out.
Rachel says that they are so similar in all their tastes and ideals that if she were a man she would be Percival, and if he were a woman he would be Rachel. "Then you still would have a chance to marry each other," I said frivolously. But she a.s.sented with a depth of feeling which ignored my feeble attempt to be cheerful. "Yet," she continued, "there is a subtle, alluring difference in our thoughts; just enough to add piquancy, not irritation, to a discussion. I do not love white, and he does not love black, as so many husbands and wives do. We both love gray; different tones of gray, but still gray. It is very restful." The Percivals are not only restful to themselves, but to others. They used to be in the highly irritable, nervous state of those whose sensitive organisms are a little too fine for this world. I never objected to it myself, but I have said before that Rachel was of no use to ordinary society, and Percival was little better. When people failed to understand her, she retired into herself with a dignity which was mistaken for ill-temper. She is too refined and high-minded to defend herself against the "slings and arrows of outrageous" people, although if she would, she could exterminate them with her wit. And some could so easily be spared. It seems, too, that she is great enough to be a target, so she is under fire continually. This, while it causes her exquisite suffering, is from no fault of her own--save the unforgivable one of being original. "A frog spat at a glow-worm. "Why do you spit at me?" said the glow-worm. "Why do you shine so?" said the frog." And as to Percival--the man I used to know was Percival in embryo.
He is maturing now, and is radiant in Rachel"s sympathetic comprehension of him. He refers to the time before he knew her as his "protoplasmic state," as indeed it was. But there are a good many of us who would be willing to remain protoplasm all our lives to possess a t.i.the of his genius--you and I among the number, Tabby. You needn"t look at me so reproachfully out of your old-gold eyes. You know you would.
You have seen Sallie c.o.x, haven"t you? Then you know how it jarred my nerves to have her rush in upon me when my mind was full of the Percivals.
Sallie has flirted joyously through life thus far, and has appeared to have about as little heart as any girl I ever knew. Sallie is the _sauce piquante_ in one"s life--absolutely necessary at times to make things taste at all, but a little of her goes a long way. At least so I thought until to-day.
"I"ve got something to tell you, Ruth," she said, "so come with me, and we will take a little drive before going to cooking-school."
I went, knowing, of course, that she wanted to confide something about some of her lovers.