People of the Whirlpool, Mabel Osgood Wright [sneezy the snowman read aloud .txt] 📗

said Miss Lavinia, from the lounge close at my elbow. "Not in colouring or feature, but in poise and gesture. The Lathams were of Massachusetts stock, and have, I imagine, a good deal of the Plymouth Rock mixture in their back-bones. Her father has the reputation, in fact, of being all rock, if not quite of the Plymouth variety. Well, I think she will need it, poor child; that is, if any of the rumours that are beginning to float in the air settle to the ground."

"Meaning what?" I asked, half unconsciously, and paying little heed, for I then realized that the daily letter from father had not arrived; and Lucy at that moment came in, lit the lamps, and began to rattle the hair-brushes in Miss Lavinia's bedroom, which I took as a signal for me to leave.

The door-bell rang. It was Evan; but before I met him halfway on the stairs, he called up: "I telephoned home an hour ago, and they are all well. The storm held over last night there. Father says it was the most showy snow they have had for years, and he was delayed in getting his letter to the post."

"Is that all?" I asked, as I got down far enough to rest my hands on his shoulders.

"Yes; the wires buzzed badly and did not encourage gossip. Ah!" (this with an effort to appear as if it was an afterthought), "I told him I thought that you would not wait for me tomorrow, but probably go home on the 9:30. Not that I really committed you to it if you have other plans!"

* * * * *

Martin Cortright appeared some five minutes before Horace Bradford. As it chanced, when the latter came in the door Sylvia was on the stairs, so that her greeting and hearty handshake were given looking down at him, and she waited in the hall, in a perfectly unembarrassed way, as a matter of course, while he freed himself from his heavy coat. His glance at the tall girl, who came down from the darkness above, in her shimmering gown, with golden daffies in her hair and on her breast, like a beam of wholesome sunshine, was full of honest, personal admiration. If it had been otherwise I should have been disappointed in the man's completeness. Then, looking at them from out of the library shadows, I wondered what he would have thought if his entry had been at the Latham home instead of at Miss Lavinia's, how he would have passed the ordeal of Perkins, Potts, and Parker, and if his spontaneity would have been marred by the formality.

Perhaps he would have been oblivious. Some men have the happy gift of not being annoyed by things that are thorns in the flesh to otherwise quite independent women. Father, however, is always amused by flunkies, and treats them as an expected part of the show; even as the jovial Autocrat did when, at a grand London house, "it took full six men in red satin knee-breeches" to admit him and his companion.

Bradford did not wear an evening suit; neither did he deem apology necessary. If he thought of the matter at all, which I doubt, he evidently considered that he was among friends, who would make whatever excuses were necessary from the circumstances of his hurried trip.

Then we went in to the dining-room, Miss Lavinia leading with Martin Cortright, as the most recent acquaintance, and therefore formal guest, the rest of us following in a group. Miss Lavinia, of course, took the head of the table, Evan opposite, and the two men, Cortright on her right and Bradford on her left, making Sylvia and me vis-a-vis.

The men appropriated their buttonhole flowers naturally. Martin smiled at my choice for him, which was a small, but chubby, red and yellow, uncompromising Dutch tulip, far too stout to be able to follow its family habit of night closing, except to contract itself slightly. Evan caressed his lilies-of-the-valley lightly with his finger-tips as he fastened them in place, but Bradford broke into a boyish laugh, and then blushed to the eyes, when he saw the tiny bunch of primroses, saying: "You have a long memory, Miss Sylvia, yet mine is longer. May I have a sprig of that, too?" and he reached over a big-boned hand to where the greenhouse-bred wands of yellow Forsythia were laid in a formal pattern bordering the paths. "That is the first flower that I remember. A great bush of it used to grow in a protected spot almost against the kitchen window at home; and when I see a bit of it in a strange place, for a minute I collapse into the little chap in outrageous gathered trousers, who used to reach out the window for the top twigs, that blossomed earliest, so as to be the first to carry 'yellow bells' to school for a teacher that I used to think was Venus and Minerva rolled in one. I saw her in Boston the other day, and the Venus hallucination is shattered, but the yellow bells look just the same, proving--"

"That every prospect pleases And man (or woman) alone is vile,"

interpolated Evan.

Grape fruit, with a dash of sherry, or the more wholesome sloe-gin, is Miss Lavinia's compromise with the before-dinner cocktail of society, that is really very awakening to both brain and digestion; and before the quaint silver soup tureen had disappeared, even Martin Cortright had not only come wholly out of his shell, but might have been said to have fairly perched on top of it, before starting on a reminiscent career with his hostess, beginning at one of the monthly meetings of the Historical Society; for though Martin's past belonged more to the "Second Avenue" faction of the old east side, and Miss Lavinia to the west, among the environs of what had once been Greenwich and Chelsea villages, they had trodden the same paths, though not at the same time. While Sylvia and the "Professor," as she at once began to call him, picked up the web of the college loom that takes in threads of silk, wool, and cotton, and mixing or separating them at random, turns out garments of complete fashion and pattern, or misfits full of false starts or dropped stitches that not only hamper the wearers, but sometimes their families, for life. All that Evan and I had to do was to maintain a sympathetic silence, kept by occasional ejaculations and murmurs from growing so profound as to cause a draught at our corner of the table. "Yes, we used to go there regularly," I heard Miss Lavinia say; "when we were girls Eleanor (Barbara's mother) and I attended the same school--Miss Black's,--Eleanor being a boarding and I a day pupil and a clergyman's daughter also, which, in those days, was considered a sort of patent of respectability. Miss Black used to allow her to spend the shorter holidays with me and go to those historical lectures as a matter of course. We never publicly mentioned the fact that Eleanor also liked to come to my house to get thoroughly warmed and take a bath, as one of Miss Black's principles of education was that feminine propriety and cold rooms were synonymous, and the long room with a glass roof, sacred to bathing, was known as the 'refrigerator'; but those atrocities that were committed in the name of education have fortunately been stopped by education itself. I don't think that either of us paid much attention to the lectures; the main thing was to get out and go somewhere; yet I don't think any other later good times were as breathlessly fascinating.

"Mother seldom went, the hermetically sealed, air-proof architecture of the place not agreeing with her; so father, Eleanor, and I used to walk over, crossing the head of Washington Square, until, as we passed St. Mark's Church and reached the steps of the building, we often headed a procession as sedate and serious as if going to Sunday meeting, for there were fewer places to go in those days. Once within, we usually crept well up front, for my father was one of the executive committee who sat in the row of chairs immediately facing the platform, and to be near him added several inches to my stature and importance, at least in my own estimation. Then, too, there was always the awesome and fascinating possibility that one of these honourable personages might fall audibly asleep, or slip from his chair in a moment of relaxation. Such events had been known to occur. In fact, my father's habit of settling down until his neck rested upon the low chair back, made the slipping accident a perpetual possibility in his case.

"Then, when the meeting was called to order, and the minutes read with many h-hems and clearings of the throat, and the various motions put to vote with the mumbled 'All-in-favour-of-the-motion-will-please-signify- by-saying-Ay! Contrary-minded-no-the-motion-is-accepted!' that some one would only say 'No' was our perpetual wish, and we even once meditated doing it ourselves, but could not decide which should take the risk.

"Another one of our amusements was to give odd names to the dignitaries who presided. One with lurching gait, erectile whiskers, and blinking eyes we called 'The Owl'; while another, a handsome old man of the 'Signer' type, pink-cheeked, deep eyed, with a fine aquiline nose, we named 'The Eagle.'"

"Oh, I know whom you mean, exactly!" cried Martin, throwing back his head and laughing as heartily as Bradford might; "and 'The Owl' was supposed to have intentions of perpetuating his name by leaving the society money enough for a new building, but he didn't. But then, he doubtless inherited his thrift from the worthy ancestors of the ilk of those men who utilized trousers for a land measure. Do you also remember the discussions that followed the reading of paper or lecture? Sometimes quite heated ones too, if the remarks had ventured to even graze the historical bunions that afflicted the feet of many old families."

"No, I think we were too anxious to have the meeting declared adjourned to heed such things. How we stretched ourselves; the physical oppression that had been settling for an hour or two lifting suddenly as we got on our feet and felt that we might speak in our natural voices.

"Then father would say, 'You may go upstairs and examine the curiosities before joining us in the basement,' and we would go up timidly and inspect the Egyptian mummy. I wonder how he felt last year when there was a reception in the hall and a band broke the long stillness with 'The Gay Tomtit.' Was ever such chocolate or such sandwiches served in equally sepulchral surroundings as in the long room below stairs. I remember wondering if the early Christians ever lunched in the catacombs, and how they felt; and I should not have been surprised if Lazarus himself had appeared in one of the archways trailing his graveclothes after him, so strong was the spell of the mummy upon us.

"It seems really very odd that you were one of those polite young men who used sometimes to pass the plates of sandwiches to us where we stayed hidden in a corner so that the parental eye need not see how many we consumed."

Thus did Martin Cortright and Miss Lavinia meet on common ground and drift into easy friendship which it would have taken years of conventional intercourse to accomplish, while opposite, the talk between Sylvia and Bradford