XVIII
Elizabeth did not go often to the Country Club, and almost never for any pleasure she herself could find; now and then she went with her father, in order to lure him out of doors; but to-day she had come with Dick, who wanted some fitting destination for his new touring car. She was finding on a deserted end of the veranda a relief from the summer heat that for a week had smothered the city. A breeze was blowing off the river, and she lay back languidly in her wicker chair and let it play upon her brow. In her lap lay an open book, but she was not reading it nor meditating on it; she held it in readiness to ward off interruption; her reputation as a reader of books, while it made her formidable to many and gave her an unpopularity that was more and more grieving her mother, had its compensations—people would not often intrude upon a book. She looked off across the river. On its smooth surface tiny sail-boats were moving; on the opposite bank there was the picturesque windmill of a farm-house, white against the bright green. The slender young oak trees were rustling in the wind; the links were dotted with players in white, and the distant flags and fluttering guidons that marked hidden putting greens. Then suddenly Marriott was before her. He had come in from the links, and he stood now bareheaded, glowing from his exercise, folding his arms on the veranda rail. His forearms were blazing red from their first burning of the season, and his nose was burned red, giving him a merry look that made Elizabeth smile.
“My! but you’re burned!” she exclaimed.
“Am I?” said Marriott, pleased.
“Yes—like a mower,” she added, remembering some men working in a field that had fled past them as they came out in the automobile. She remembered she had fancied the men burned brown as golfers, and she had some half-formed notion of a sentence she might turn at the expense of a certain literary school that viewed life thus upside down. She might have gone on then and talked it over with Marriott, but her brain was too tired; she could moralize just then no further than to say:
“You don’t deserve to be burned as a mower—your work isn’t as hard.”
“No,” said Marriott, “it isn’t work at all—it’s exercise; it’s a substitute for the work I should be doing.” A look of disgust came to his face.
She did not wish then to talk seriously; she was trying to forget problems, and she and Marriott were always discussing problems.
“It’s absurd,” Marriott was saying. “I do this to get the exercise I ought to get by working, by producing something—the exercise is the end, not an incident of the means. You don’t see any of these farmers around here playing golf. They’re too tired—”
“Gordon,” said Elizabeth, “I’m going away.”
“Where to?” he asked, looking up suddenly.
“To Europe,” she said.
“Europe! Why, when? You must have decided hurriedly.”
“Yes, the other night after I came home from Mr. Parrish’s—we decided rather quickly—or papa decided for us.”
“Well!” Marriott exclaimed again. “That’s fine!”
He looked away toward the first tee, where his caddie was waiting for him. He beckoned, and the boy came with his bag.
“Tell Mr. Phillips I’ll not play any more—I’ll see him later.”
The caddie took up the bag and went lazily away, stopping to take several practice swings with one of Marriott’s drivers. The boy was always swinging this club in the hope that Marriott would give it to him.
Marriott placed his hands on the rail, sprang over it, and drew up a chair.
“Well, this is sudden,” he said, “but it’s fine for you.” He took out a cigarette. “How did it happen?”
“Do you want the real reason?” she asked.
“Of course; I’ve a passion for the real.”
“I’m going in order to get away.”
Marriott was sheltering in his palms a match for his cigarette. He looked up suddenly, the cigarette still between his lips.
“Away from what?”
“Oh, from—everything!” She waved her hands despairingly. Marriott did not understand.
“That’s it,” she said, looking him in the eyes. He saw that she was very serious. He lighted his cigarette, and flung away the match that was just beginning to burn his fingers.
“I’m going to run away; I’m going to forget for a whole summer. I’m going to have a good time. When I come back in the fall I’m going to the Charity Bureau and do some work, but until then—”
“Who’s going with you?” asked Marriott. He had thought of other things to say, but decided against them.
“Mama.”
“And your father?”
“Oh, he can’t go. He and Dick will stay at home.”
“Then you won’t shut up the house?”
“No, we’ll let the maids go, but we’ve got Gusta Koerner to come in every day and look after things. I’m glad for her sake—and ours. We can trust her.”
“I should think Dick would want to go.”
“No, he has this new automobile now, and he says, too, that he can’t leave the bank.” She smiled as she thought of the seriousness with which Dick was regarding his new duties.
“Then you’ll not go to Mackinac?”
“No, we’ll close the cottage this summer. Papa doesn’t want to go there without us, and—”
“But Dick will miss his yacht.”
“Oh, the yacht has been wholly superseded in his affections by the auto.”
“Well,” said Marriott, “I’ll not go north myself then. I had thought of going up and hanging around, but now—”
She looked to see if he were in earnest.
“Really, I’m not as excited over the prospect of going to Europe as I should be,” said Elizabeth with a little regret in her tone. “I haven’t been in Europe since I graduated, and I’ve been looking forward to going again—”
“Oh, you’ll have a great time,” Marriott interrupted.
She leaned back and Marriott eyed her narrowly; he saw that her look was weary.
“Well, you need a rest. It was such a long, hard winter.”
Elizabeth did not reply. She looked away across the river and Marriott followed her gaze; the sky in the west was darkening, the afternoon had grown sultry.
“Gordon,” she said presently, “I want you to do something for me.”
His heart leaped a little at her words.
“Anything you say,” he answered.
“Won’t you”—she hesitated a moment—“won’t you look after Dick a little this summer? Just keep an eye on him, don’t you know?”
Marriott laughed, and then he grew sober. He realized that he, perhaps, understood the seriousness that was behind her request better than she did, but he said nothing, for it was all so difficult.
“Oh, he doesn’t need any watching,” he said, by way of reassuring her.
“You will understand me, I’m sure.” She turned her gray eyes on him. “I think it is a critical time with him. I don’t know what he does—I don’t want to know; I don’t mean that you are to pry about, or do anything surreptitious, or anything of that sort. You know, of course; don’t you?”
“Why, certainly,” he said.
“But I have felt—you see,” she scarcely knew how to go about it; “I have an idea that if he could have a certain kind of influence in his life, something wholesome—I think you could supply that.”
Marriott was moved by her confidence; he felt a great affection for her in that instant.
“It’s good in you, Elizabeth,” he said, and he lingered an instant in pronouncing the syllables of her name, “but you really overestimate. Dick’s all right, but he’s young. I’m not old, to be sure; but he’d think me old.”
“I can see that would be in the way,” she frankly admitted. “I don’t know just how it could be done; perhaps it can’t be done at all.”
“And then, besides all that,” Marriott went on, “I don’t know of any good I could do him. I don’t know that there is anything he really needs more than we all need.”
“Oh, yes there is,” she insisted. “And there is much you could give him. Perhaps it would bore you—”
He protested.
“Oh, I know!” she said determinedly. “We can be frank with each other, Gordon. Dick is a man only in size and the clothes he wears; he’s still a child—a good, kind-hearted, affectionate, thoughtless child. The whole thing perplexes me and it has perplexed papa—you might as well know that. I have tried, and I can do nothing. He doesn’t care for books, and somehow when I prescribe books and they fail, or are not accepted, I’m at the end of my resources. I have been trying to think it all out, but I can’t. I know that something is wrong, but I can’t tell you what it is. I only know that I feel it, and that it troubles me and worries me—and that I am tired.” Then, as if he might misunderstand, she went on with an air of haste: “I don’t mean necessarily anything wrong in Dick himself, but something wrong in—oh, I don’t know what I mean!”
She lifted her hand in a little gesture of despair.
“I feel somehow that the poor boy has had no chance in the world—though he has had every advantage and opportunity.” Her face lighted up instantly with a kind of pleasure. “That’s it!” she exclaimed. “You see”—it was all clear to her just then, or would be if she could put the thought into words before she lost it—“there is nothing for him to do; there is no work for him, no necessity for his working at all. This new place he has in the Trust Company—he seems happy and important in it just now, but after all it doesn’t seem to me real; he isn’t actually needed there; he got the place just because Mr. Hunter is a friend of papa.” The thought that for an instant had seemed on the point of being posited was nebulous again. “Don’t you understand?” she said, turning to him for help.
“I think I do,” said Marriott. His brows were contracted and he was trying to grasp her meaning.
“It’s hard to express,” Elizabeth went on. “I think I mean that Dick would be a great deal better off if he did not have a—rich father.” She hesitated before saying it, a little embarrassed. “If he had to work, if he had his own way to make in the world—”
“It is generally considered a great blessing to have a rich father,” said Marriott.
“Yes,” said Elizabeth, “it is. I’ve heard that very word used—in church, too. But with Dick”—she went back to the personal aspect of the question, which seemed easier—“what is his life? Last summer, up at the island, it was the yacht—with a hired skipper to do the real work. This summer it’s the touring-car; it’s always some sensation, something physical, something to kill time with—and what kind of conception of life is that?”
She turned and looked at him with’ a little arch of triumph in her brows, at having attained this expression of her thought.
“We all have a conception of life that is more or less confused,” Marriott generalized. “That is, when we have any conception at all.”
“Of course,” said Elizabeth, “I presume Dick’s conception is as good as mine; and that his life is quite as useful. My life has been every bit as objective—I have a round of little duties—teas and balls and parties, and all that sort of thing, of course. I’ve been sheltered, like all girls of my class; but poor Dick—he’s exposed, that is the difference.”
She was silent for a while. Marriott had not known before how deep her thought had gone.
“I’m utterly useless in the world,” she went on, “and I’m sick of it! Sick of it!” She had grown vehement, and her little fists clenched in her lap, until the knuckles showed white.
“Do you know what I’ve a notion of doing?” she said.
“No; what?”
“I’ve a notion to go and work in a factory, say half a day, and give some poor girl a half-holiday.”
“But you’d take her wages from her,” said Marriott.
“Oh, I’d give her the wages.”
Marriott shook his head slowly, doubtingly.
“I know it’s impractical,” Elizabeth went on. “Of course, I’d never do it. Why, people would think I’d gone crazy! Imagine what mama would say!”
She smiled at the absurdity.
“No,” she said, “I’ll have to go on, and lead my idle, useless life. That’s what it is, Gordon.” He saw the latent fires of indignation and protest leap into her eyes. “It’s this life—this horrible, false, insane life! That’s what it is! The poor boy is beside himself with it, and he doesn’t know it. There is no place for him, nothing for him to do; it’s the logic of events.”
He was surprised to see such penetration in her.
“I’ve been thinking it out,” she hurried to explain. “I’ve suffered from it myself. I’ve felt it for a long time, without understanding it, and I don’t understand it very well now, but I’m beginning to. Of what use am I in the world? Not a bit—there isn’t a single thing I can do. All this whole winter I’ve been going about to a lot of useless affairs, meeting and chattering with a lot of people who have no real life at all—who are of no more use in the world than I. I’m wearing myself out at it—and here I am, glad that the long, necessary waste of time is over—tired and sick, of this—this—sofa-pillow existence!” She thumped a silken pillow that lay on a long wicker divan beside her, thumped it viciously and with a hatred.
“Sometimes I feel that I’d like to leave the town and never see anybody in it again!” Elizabeth exclaimed. “Don’t you?”
“Yes—but—”
“But what?”
“But is there any place where we could escape it all?”
“There must be some place—some place where we know no one, so that no one’s cares could be our cares, where we could be mere disinterested spectators and sit aloof, and observe life, and not feel that it was any concern of ours at all. That’s what I want. I’d like to escape this horrible ennui.”
“Well, the summer’s here and we can have our vacations. Of course,” he added whimsically, “the Koerners will have no vacation.”
“Gordon, don’t you ever dare to mention the Koerners again!”