We Three

We Three.

by Gouverneur Morris.

I

When I know that Lucy is going to Palm Beach for the winter I shall go to Aiken. When I know that she is going to Aiken, I shall go to Palm Beach. And I shall play the same game with Bar Harbor, Newport, Europe, and other summer resorts. So we shall only meet by accident, and hardly ever. We"ve been asked not to.

But I ought to begin further back. It would do no harm to begin at the beginning. There is even a king"s advice to that effect. Said the king in "Alice," "Begin at the Beginning, go on to the End, and then stop."

In the beginning, then: When I was a little boy, old enough to be warned against playing with matches, I began of course to think them desirable playthings, and whenever I got a chance played with them.

And I never:

(1) Set myself on fire,

(2) Nor anybody else,

(3) Nor the house in which my parents lived with me.

And yet I had been told that I should do all of these things; not often perhaps, but certainly every once in a while.

Of course it is possible to do all sorts of things with a match. You may light it and blow it out, for instance. Lighted, you may put it in your mouth without burning yourself. And if you do this in the dark, the light will shine through your cheek, and if you are a fat child you will give the impression of a Hallowe"en lantern carved from a pumpkin.

Or you may light the b.u.t.t of your father"s cigar and learn to smoke.

It is one of the cheapest ways. Or you may set fire to the lower edge of the newspaper which your grandfather is reading in the big armchair by the window, and I guarantee that you will surprise him. Here is an interesting play: Light a match, blow it out, and, while the end is still red hot, touch the cook firmly on the back of the neck. If she has been reading Swinburne she will imagine that she has been kissed by a policeman. When she finds out that she hasn"t she will be disappointed, and perhaps you will be disappointed, too. Oh, a match is a wonderful thing, even the wooden ones that are made on earth! You may burn a whole city to the ground. And once, I am told, there was a man who lighted a match and fired a cannon that was heard around the world.

To play with matches is one thing: to play with the fire that you have lighted, or helped light, is another. And it was not until I played with fire that I did any real harm in this world (that I know about).

Playing with fire I singed a moth; I singed a b.u.t.terfly, and I burnt a man.

If this was just the story of my own life I wouldn"t be so impertinent as to hope that it would be interesting to anybody. It isn"t my story, and no matter how much I may seem to figure in it, I am neither its hero, nor, I think, the G.o.d who started the machinery.

Thirty-five years ago I took to live with me a middle-aged couple, who had begun to fear that they were going to die without issue. Though I say it that shouldn"t, I was very good to them. I let them kiss me and maul me from morning till night. Later, when I knew that it was the very worst thing in the world for me, I let them spoil me as much as they wanted to. They even gave me the man"s name, without my consent, and I didn"t make a row. But I _did_ lift my head with sufficient suddenness and violence to cause the Bishop of New York to bite his tongue, and to utter a word that is not to be found in the prayer book.

I was christened Archibald Mannering d.a.m.n.

But I have never used the surname with which the good Bishop so suddenly and without due authorization provided me. Certain old friends, acquainted with the story, do not always, however, show my exquisite taste and reticence in this matter. Only the other day in the Knickerbocker Club I overheard some men talking. And one of them, in a voice which I did not care for, said "Archibald Mannering--d.a.m.n!"

And conveyed without other word or qualification than the tone of his voice, that he had very little use for me. Well, I can thank G.o.d for putting into the world some other people who have not that man"s clearsightedness and excellent powers for pa.s.sing judgment upon his fellow men.

So the man gave me his name and took other liberties with me, and the woman gave me her watch to break (I broke it) and took other liberties, and a second woman who called herself Nana took still other liberties with me--liberties which made me furiously angry at the time, and which even now would make me blush.

Sometimes I was sorry that I had taken the man and the woman to live with me. At times they bored me. They seemed to me intelligent, and I had to choose my words carefully, and talk down to them as to a pair of children. But I got used to them gradually. And I got to like them, especially the woman. I even formed the habit of forgiving her things offhand without being asked to--Oh, my dear parents, I am only trying to poke a little fun at you! And you weren"t middle-aged when you came to live with me. I only imagine that you must have seemed so to a baby whose eyes had only just come undone. Thirty-five years have rolled by--bringing, taking, and, alas! leaving behind them cares and vicissitudes, and still you seem no more than middle-aged to me. You, father, with your fine, frank weather-beaten face of a county squire with the merry smile and the wit which makes you so welcome wherever you go, even those ghosts of sorrow deep in your eyes don"t make you look more than middle-aged. And yet I think no hour of your life pa.s.ses in which you don"t recall, with a strangling at your throat, how my little sister, Pitapat, came in from the garden drooping, to you, almost always to you, when she was in trouble, and climbed and was lifted into your lap, and cuddled against you--Oh, I can"t write the rest. But I tell you that I, too, sir, have recalled little Pitapat, and how she died, all on a summer"s day, in her "Dada"s" arms, and that the thought of what she was to you, and what such another child might be to such another man, has twisted even my tough entrails, and caused me for once, at least, to draw back from a piece of easy and enticing mischief, and play the man.

And you, mother, with your face of a saint, haven"t I always poked fun at you? You don"t look more than middle-aged either. You look less.

And yet you too have your sorrow that never dies. For you were fitted to be a mother of men, and you have brought into the world only a lovely flower that soon withered away, and a b.u.t.terfly.

I don"t call myself a b.u.t.terfly from choice. I only do it because I"m trying to be honest, and I think that it"s just about what I am. But do we really know what a b.u.t.terfly is? Have we given that ornamental (though I say it--that shouldn"t) and light-minded (though I say it with shame) and light-hearted (though the very lightest of hearts must weigh _something_, you know) insect a square deal? I confess that only a light-hearted insect would perpetrate such a sentence as the foregoing; but wouldn"t it be fun if, when the whole truth comes to be known about b.u.t.terflies, we found them more or less self-respecting, more or less monogamous, occasionally ratiocinative, carelessly kind, rather than light-hearted creatures, and not insects, in the accepted sense, at all? It would surprise me no more to learn that an insect was really a man, than that a man, even so great and thinking a man as Mr. Bryan for example, was an insect.

If the b.u.t.terfly at lunch flits from flower to flower; and the b.u.t.terfly at play flits from b.u.t.terfly to b.u.t.terfly; so then may the b.u.t.terfly (at what he is pleased to call his work) flit from theme to theme, from subject to subject, from character to character, from plot to counterplot, and crosswise and back again. If more autobiographists realized how many difficulties may be avoided in this way, far fewer autobiographists would be heroes and many, many more would be b.u.t.terflies.

II

Even before I was born the richer people of New York did not inhabit that city the year round, but their holiday excursions were far shorter than now, both in distance and duration. To escape the intenser heats of summer the moneyed citizen of those days sent his family to the seaside for six weeks or to the mountains. Later his family began to insist that it must also be spared the seasons of intense cold. And nowadays there are families (and the number of these increases by leaps and bounds) who if they are not allowed to escape from everything which seems to them disagreeable or difficult, get very down in the mouth about it. Even the laboring cla.s.ses are affected. The rich man wishes to live without any discomfort whatever, and the poor man wishes to live without doing any work whatever. That, I think, is at the root of their most b.l.o.o.d.y differences of opinion, for the poor man thinks that the rich man ought to be uncomfortable, and the rich man thinks that the poor man ought to work. And they will never be in agreement.

Given enough money it becomes easier and easier to run from one difficulty or discomfort into another. And even the laborer finds it continually easier to make a living without earning it.

When I was a little boy, Newport and Bar Harbor were a long way from New York. To Europe was a real voyage; while such places as Palm Beach and Aiken were never mentioned in polite society, for the simple reason that polite society had never heard of them. But nowadays it is not uncommon for a man to have visited all these places (and some of them more than once) in the course of a year. Europe which was once a foreign country is now but as a suburb of New York. And I myself, I am happy to say, have been far oftener in Paris than in Brooklyn.

The modern b.u.t.terfly thinks little of flying out to Pittsburg or Cleveland or St. Louis for a dance or a mere wedding. He attends athletic events thousands of miles apart, and knows his way from the front door to the bar and card room of every important club between the Jockey Club in Paris and the Pacific Union in San Francisco, excepting, of course, those clubs in his own city to which he does not happen to belong.

My father, because of my little sister"s fragility, was one of the first men I know to make a practice of going South for the winter, and to Long Island for the spring and autumn. In summer we went to Europe or Bar Harbor, for with justice he preferred the climate of the latter to that of Newport or Southampton. We were less and less in our town house, and indeed so jumped about from place to place, that although my mother succeeded in making her other houses easy and indeed charming to live in, I have never known what it was to have a home. And indeed I cannot at this moment call to mind a single New York family of the upper cla.s.s that lives in a home.

My mother is old-fashioned. She would have preferred to live in one place the year around, to beautify and to enn.o.ble that place; to be buried from it as she had been married into it, and to leave upon it the stamp of her character, incessant industry and good taste; to fill it gradually with the things she loved best or admired most, and to be always there, ready for the children or the grandchildren to come home.

But she gave up this ambition at a hint of delicacy in a child"s face, and a note of anxiety in a husband"s voice, and took to packing trunks to go somewhere, and unpacking them when they arrived. Of course she couldn"t do this to all of them, for we moved with very many, but there were certain ones to which she would let n.o.body put hand but herself--my father"s, my sister"s, mine, and her own. And you always knew that if you had accidentally left letters and notes in your pockets that you didn"t want seen, they wouldn"t be.

My father would almost abuse her for doing so much work with her own hands, and for always being up so early, but in secret he was very proud of her; and to see her dressed for the dance or the opera, eager and gay as a girl, slender and beautiful, her head very high and fearless, you would have thought that she had never done anything in all her life, but be pampered and groomed and sheltered.

Upon one good old-fashioned custom they were in firm agreement. They always slept in the same bed; they do still. And they will lie in the same grave.

Whichever home it was that we happened to be inhabiting, unless out of season because of my sister, it was always pretty well filled with people. My father loved people, and my mother got to love them for his sake. For my part, until very recently, I have always hated to be alone. Flint is a gloomy solitary, but when he meets with Steel there are sparks.

I suppose there are brooding lovers of knowledge in this world who are fonder of their own than of any other company. But most people can only think half thoughts and need other people to complete them. It is amusing enough to knock a ball against a wall, and a wonderful help in the perfection of strokes, but it is far more amusing to face somebody across a net and play lawn tennis.

My father and mother always hoped that I would be a great man, and even now they hope that I may one day turn over a new leaf. Unfortunately there was no greatness in me, and as for those leaves of my life which I have not yet read, they are uncut, and I am always mislaying the paper knife. And whether the matter on the next leaf or the one after will be new or not, is for the future to know. You cannot, I think, teach a child to grow great.

But you can teach a child to dance and swim and shoot and sail, and to ride and to be polite, and to keep clean, and by example rather than precept, to be natural and unaffected! It was hoped then that I would be a great man; in the event, however, of my turning out to be nothing but a b.u.t.terfly, I was brought up to be as ornamental a b.u.t.terfly as possible. I cannot remember when I wasn"t being prepared and groomed to take, without awkwardness, a place in society.

Well-bred grown-ups talk to children, without affectation or condescension, as if they too were grown-ups. My parents were always entertaining people, and it was a.s.sumed without comment that I too was host no less than they. Twice a day I had to be in evidence: at tea time, face and hands shining clean, hair carefully brushed, my small body covered with crisp white duck, black silk stockings, on my legs, and patent leather pumps on my feet. No conversation was required of me, but if I had forgotten a name and the face that went with it, I was allowed to feel uncomfortable; allowed to feel as a grown man feels when he has accidentally said something that would better have been left unsaid. It was my duty to go accurately from guest to guest, to shake hands, and to say perfectly naturally not "Hunh!" as so many modern children do, but "How do you do, Mrs. Lessing," or "How do you do, Mrs. Green," and not to stare and fidget or be awkward. Then I had my tea, discolored hot water with sugar and cream, my b.u.t.tered toast, and a bit of cake. After that my mother would make it exceedingly easy for me to get away. My second public appearance was just before dinner. Then, dressed once more in white and patent leather, I came to the drawing-room to wish and be wished good night.

To obey my mother, when there was no real temptation to disobey her, was very easy, and n.o.body ever saw me look sulky or balky when I was told to do this or that. It was easy to obey her, because from the first, she took it absolutely for granted that she was going to be obeyed. Of course it was different with general orders designed to cover long periods of time, for here the tempter had his chance at me, and I was forever falling. "Stop kicking the table leg, Archie," is an order easily and instantly obeyed. For "Never kick a table," I cannot say the same. I used to divide her orders into two cla.s.ses: The now nows and the never nevers. The latter were mostly beyond me. Though you may halt one sinner in the act of throwing a stone at another, there is little reason to believe that he will not soon be trying his aim again.

I like children when they are polite and a little reticent, when they are not too much in evidence, and when the whole household is not made to revolve about them.

Fulton once said to me, in that shy yet eager way of his: "If only I could arrest my babies" development; keep them exactly as they are; on tap when I wanted them, and hibernated like a couple of little bears when I was busy and mustn"t be disturbed! They should never change, while I lived, if I had my way. And I"d promise not to abuse my privileges. I"d only take "em out of the ice box when I absolutely needed them and couldn"t do without them."

It was the first time that I ever was in the Fulton house that he said that. The two babies, a boy and a girl, Jock and "Hurry," two roly-polies, with their mother"s eyes and mischievous smile, had been brought in to the tea table to be polite and share a lump of sugar.

And they had been very polite, and had shown the proper command over their shyness, and had shaken me decorously by the hand, and made their funny grave little bows and asked me how I did. And I had said something in praise of the little girl to her face, and Fulton had reproached me a little for doing so.

"In India," he had said, "it is very bad luck to praise a child to its face, very bad luck indeed."

"I"m so sorry," I said, when the children had gone. "I ought to have remembered that even very little babies in the cradle understand everything that"s said to them. May I praise them now? Because they are the two most delicious babies in the world. I"d like to eat them."

"When I"m tired or worried," said Fulton, his eyes lighting with tenderness, "Hurry always knows. And she comes and climbs into my lap and leans against me without saying a word, and she keeps creepy-mouse still until she knows that I"m feeling better. Then she chuckles, and I hug her. Sometimes I wish that she was made like a tennis ball; then I could hug her as hard as I wanted to without hurting her."

While he was speaking, Mrs. Fulton looked all the time at her husband"s face. I remember thinking, "G.o.d! If ever some woman should look at me like that!" Her mouth smiled mischievously, just the way little Hurry"s smiled, and her eyes--I won"t try to describe the love and tenderness that was in them, nor the dog-like faithfulness--were eyes that prayed. And they were the deepest, most brilliant blue--like those Rheims windows that the Beast smashed the other day. She laughed and said: "Hurry and her father don"t care about each other--not _at_ all."

Fulton lifted his eyes to hers and it was as if "I _love_ you" flashed from each to the other in that crumb of time. His face reddened a little, and hers became more rosy. They weren"t a bit ashamed of being obviously in love with each other. I think they rather prided themselves on it.