Chapter XIX The Ferris Wheel
It was half past nine when the wagonette bringing Clover and Jack stopped before the house. They were received with a chorus of questions, in which Mildred was too clever not to join. She was glad that Van Tassel must see Gorham seated near her, apart from the others, confidentially discoursing in the moonlight, even though Jack did not seem to observe it. He seated himself on the step near Mrs. Page, and leaned against a railing.
“We have had a fine time!” he exclaimed with what Mildred’s practiced ear recognized as unmistakable sincerity.
“Oh, the German village by moonlight, Milly!” added Clover, taking a place near her sister. “You really ought to see it.”
“We ought to have been there, Mr. Page,” said Mildred regretfully.
“I doubt if I could have had a pleasanter evening anywhere,” he returned; and if Miss Bryant had had power to decorate him she would have done so on the spot for that timely speech. She trusted Jack had heard it.
“We sat there at table, you know,” went on the latter, “and saw the moon come up over those quaint old gables. Oh, it was fine. I declare, we didn’t know where we were. Did we, Clover?”
“I thought you were quite certain by the alleged German you entertained me with.”
“Alleged German! Well, if this isn’t sad! There I wasted Heine’s poems by the yard on you. Ungrateful girl! You will never know all the sweet things that were said to you to-night.”
“I know you drank a lot of beer and smoked too many cigars.”
“Of course, being in Rome I complimented the inhabitants by imitation.”
“Mr. Jack,” spoke Miss Berry reproachfully, “I remember well that you said once you only smoked on holidays and birthdays.”
“Certainly, Aunt Love, that is my rule still. I never break it.”
“Whose birthday is this?” demanded Miss Berry, somewhat taken back.
“How should I know? Somebody’s, surely.” Jack looked up innocently. “I never show favoritism.”
“Oh!” groaned Gorham, rising. “I can’t stay here. Discipline him, Aunt Love. I am going to my uncontaminated roof-tree.”
“Let us all take Gorham home,” suggested Jack, also rising. “I’m afraid to be left here with Aunt Love’s righteous wrath. Come, all of you. Nobody is too tired to walk to that music.”
For the band on the hotel piazza was playing the Washington Post March, which by midsummer was running neck and neck with “After the Ball.”
“Come, Robert,” said Hilda, shaking the somnolent form in the hammock.
“Hey? What? Don’t disturb me. I can die here as well as anywhere. What! Walk home with Gorham? Do you take me for an idiot? Music and moonlight!” with deep scorn. “Oh, go to! Woman, stand aside, or I shall do you an injury. Don’t tempt a desperate man.”
“Dear Robert doesn’t seem to care to come with us,” laughed Mildred sotto voce to Jack. She was determined that none other than he should walk by her side to the hotel, and of course she had her way.
An hour later she came into Clover’s bedroom, brushing her long hair. Her white wrapper fell open at the neck, disclosing her handsome throat, and she looked particularly beautiful to her partial sister.
“Where else did you and Jack go to-night beside the German village?” she asked.
“Nowhere.”
“You took supper there and stayed all the evening?”
“Yes. We really couldn’t tear ourselves away. It was like being in some romantic old story.”
Mildred smiled and hummed her favorite bit from Iolanthe.
“No indeed,” answered Clover. “I am not his mother. He doesn’t pretend that I am, and he doesn’t wish me to be: so your little song doesn’t fit the case at all.”
She did not look at her sister, but went on with her effort to braid her rebellious hair. Mildred ceased humming.
“I wish my hair was curly,” she said at last.
“We all have our gifts,” replied Clover. Mildred thought her tone sounded unusually complacent. It was a novel experience to feel aught but compassion, or tenderness, or reverent admiration for Clover, but now she suddenly found herself regarding her for the first time as another girl like herself, and observing her attractions with new eyes.
“What a pretty foot you have, Clover,” she said, looking at her sister’s slippered feet.
“Not a bit better shaped than yours, my dear. Let us have a select little mutual admiration society.”
“But mine are large,” returned Mildred, sitting down and thrusting forth her slippers for inspection.
“So are you,” suggested Clover.
“But isn’t it strange that people never consider that, in speaking of a woman’s foot? She must have small feet irrespective of her size, or else they had better never be seen or mentioned. In old novels a man sometimes keeps his beloved’s slipper under a glass case. What a formidable piece of furniture my lover will have when he gets a glass case for mine.”
“Foolish child! You are proportioned just right.”
“Perhaps; but what I say is that the consensus of opinion decides that I ought not to be. Shoe men fall in with that idea. Dainty shoes are small shoes. I tell you fame and wealth awaits the shoe-dealer who becomes inspired with the idea that large women want pretty shoes too.”
“You seem to have made Mr. Page have a delightful evening,” remarked Clover.
“Yes; he didn’t ask for one of my slippers, though. Fancy sterling cousin Page ordering a glass case!”
Clover smiled in answer to Mildred’s laugh.
“What did you talk about?”
“Oh, weights and measures, as usual. I wasn’t in the mood to be good, and I tried conscientiously to make a fool of our friend.”
“Mildred!”
“No harm done; I didn’t succeed. He made one of me instead. This has been what you might term an off day for your little sister.”
“What do you mean? How did he make a fool of you?” Clover turned with so much curiosity in her gaze that Mildred rose quickly.
“I’ll never tell you,—or hardly ever. Perhaps when we are both married.”
Clover turned back to the glass, and Mildred was a little dismayed. The words had slipped out unthinkingly. Until this evening she had agreed in her sister’s acceptance of the fact that her life could not be like that of other girls.
“Good-night,” she said, standing back of Clover and meeting her eyes in the mirror.
“Good-night,” returned the other.
Mildred kissed her cheek. “Do you like me?” she asked softly.
“Pretty well,” Mrs. Van Tassel smiled. “Lots better than you deserve.”
The younger sister went to her room satisfied. Arrogant and autocratic she might be to her slaves, but Clover’s approval was the necessary sunshine in which her life blossomed.
Van Tassel had to put a guard upon his lips in the next days. He was trying to follow Clover’s advice not to ask Mildred again to go to the Fair with him. It made the case harder, inasmuch as he could not help feeling that now she expected it. He noticed that she did not make outside engagements as much as before; but was oftener at home, either sitting about the piazzas in gowns which Jack thought the most becoming that ever girl wore, or else romping with Blitzen and paying exasperating attention to Electra, who was fast developing into the most self-assured and exacting chicken of the Columbian year.
The following sort of scene was sometimes endured in anguish by the lover who was disciplining his lady to order.
Jack was one morning reading the newspaper on the piazza, Mildred sitting in the hammock, and Clover and Hilda training the morning-glories.
“Why don’t I go to the Fair?” Mildred said, addressing the lake, resplendent with miles of diamonds.
Jack’s hand closed on his paper in his longing to accept the challenge; not being at all certain that he would not receive a negative if he did, but still yearning to try his luck.
“Is it a conundrum?” asked Clover. “I can give a guess, if you like.”
“Thank you; you’re always so kind, dear. Come, and go up in the Ferris Wheel with me, Clover. If you will, that will decide me.”
“I couldn’t, really. I’m glad I have been. One must go, of course; but twice, no, I couldn’t.” Clover passed near Jack, who threw an imploring glance at her behind his paper. “I can feel my hair whitening!” he murmured; but Mrs. Van Tassel frowned warningly upon him.
“What a pity you didn’t say something about it before Robert went,” said Hilda. “I think he means to go in the wheel to-day, as that is one of the things I can’t bring my mind to do.”
“But you will have a hundred chances, Milly dear. Some of our friends are always going,” added Clover comfortingly.
“Oh, don’t trouble yourself,” remarked Mildred with nonchalance. “I assure you I can go when I like,” and she rose and sauntered into the house, followed by Hilda.
Clover laughed softly into the pink lips of a morning glory which she held in her hand.
“This may be very good fun for you,” said Van Tassel, his unread paper dropped, “but let me tell you it is making an old man of me.”
“Do your own way then, Jack, and live to repent of it.”
“But I don’t want to have to repent.”
“Then behave as though you had some backbone. Remember Petruchio.”
“Oh, that will do to say! Petruchio was married.”
“All right. I wash my hands of you.”
“No, no, don’t, Clover.”
Clover took pity on the clouded face.
“I’ll give you a little bit of comfort, Jack,” she said, gazing down at him knowingly.
“Angel!”
“Oh, it is only a wee, wee bit; but Mildred is uncomfortable.”
“I should think that was wee,” returned Van Tassel, his face falling.
“I don’t know. It is the first time any man ever affected her that much.”
“A very poor recommendation, I should think,” remarked Van Tassel.
“Oh, Jack,” Clover laughed, “I can see you would have had an awful time without me.”
“I am having an awful time with you, Clover.”
“Then gang your ain gait any time”—
“And may God have mercy on my soul, I suppose you mean,” added Jack ruefully.
It was his habit to have flowers sent to the house almost daily, and Clover often wore his roses; Mildred never. Van Tassel asked her once if she never wore flowers, and she answered indifferently that she often did.
“I have never happened to see you with any on,” he said.
“Indeed?” she returned with one of her characteristic smiles. “Then that must be because you never sent me any. Now don’t look like that. Jack. If you should send me flowers, now, do you know what I should do with them?”
“Pitch them out the window, probably.”
“No; for that would disfigure the lawn, and Clover is very particular about the lawn. I should present them to Aunt Love.”
So Jack only gave one impotent look into her starry eyes, and continued to send his lavish floral gifts impersonally to the house.
But one morning Mildred came down with some sprays of heliotrope fastened in her dress. Van Tassel was delighted; but acting with blind faith in Clover, he did not appear to notice the concession. He had won several words of commendation from his mentor for the manner in which of late he had been playing his role. He had even called upon Mildred’s friend, Miss Eames, in response to the latter’s invitation, and had gone with her one day to the Art Gallery, and after coming home praised her discriminating and intelligent taste. It seemed to him an eternity since he had asked Mildred to go anywhere with him.
On this morning she waited for some remark upon her decoration, but none came. Matters had become serious if such condescension was not going to be gratefully received. The family usually sauntered out upon the piazza after breakfast, and Van Tassel took his paper with him to-day as usual. He was alive in every nerve to the fact that Mildred had on a street dress, which meant the Fair. He wondered profoundly, as he always did, what her plans were and whom she was going with, but he gazed unseeingly into his paper, and was dumb.
All of a sudden, a sort of electric shock seemed to pervade the air about him. Mildred was standing at his side.
“Did you notice how perfect this heliotrope is?” she asked, looking down, not at him, but at the blossoms on the lapel of her jacket.
“It is pretty,” he answered, wondering how soon his evil star would lure him on to say the wrong thing.
His apparently indifferent manner piqued her still further. “If you feel very good, and are sure you are going to be good all day, I will give you a piece,” she said, separating one spray from its fellows.
Van Tassel sprang to his feet, and in a second Mildred’s fingers were upon his coat.
“The round world is just a rattle to her, and you are one of the bells on it that jingle when she moves you.”
Clover’s words were sounding warningly in his ears. He could not help it. He only prayed to jingle in tune, for moved he was to the depths of his being.
“You like heliotrope very much?” he asked, not daring to look below her cool, fair forehead.
“Yes. Sometimes, I think, best of all; but,” with a sigh, “it goes quickly.” And she dropped her hands and moved back.
“Like all the happiest moments of life,” said Jack, and something leaped from his brown eyes that actually surprised Mildred, coming out of the long train of indifferent days.
“Oh, if Jack is like that,” she thought, and a new respect grew in her for the man who ruled himself, and refused to submit to her caprice.
“It is a clear day, Mildred. Let us go up in the Wheel,” he said. “Have you made the trip yet?”
“No, but I have a new idea about it. I’m sure it will make me dizzy. It did Clover; and I think I shall be afraid, too.”
“Don’t give up going. I’m sure you will not be afraid. It is an absolutely steady, safe motion, and the changing view is unique.”
“No, indeed; I wouldn’t give up going, only I think I would rather go alone. I don’t want any one to behold my weakness.”
“Oh, very well.” Van Tassel made a gesture of indifferent assent, sat down, and returned to his paper. The little incident of the heliotrope had done more to convince him of Clover’s wisdom than all her sage words. Its perfume stole up to him as he sat reading the same line over twelve times.
Mildred moved away, outwardly calm, inwardly vexed with Jack for his ready acquiescence.
She went into the house and met Clover. “Going to the Fair?” asked the latter.
“Yes, I think so.”
“Wait half an hour or so, and go with us.”
“I don’t believe you will take my way, for I am going in the Wheel.”
“With Jack?”
“No, alone.”
“Mr. Page wants to go again. Let me ask him. He is upstairs writing a letter.”
“Don’t speak to him for anything.”
“But I don’t want you to go to the Midway alone, Milly. Hilda and both Mr. Pages and I are going to the Anthropological Building together. Do put off the Wheel, and come with us.”
“No, I thank you. Our friend Gorham will be in his element, getting your mental and physical strength tested up there in the gallery. I wouldn’t be in that revel for anything,” and Mildred ran upstairs.
Clover passed out upon the piazza.
“Is Mildred going to the Fair?” asked Van Tassel, looking up quickly.
“Yes. I do wish for once, Jack, you had asked to go with her, for she is bound for the Ferris Wheel.”
“I did.”
“And she refused?” exclaimed Clover in surprise and exasperation. “Was there ever such an incomprehensible”—
“But she gave me this.” Van Tassel exhibited his flower.
Clover looked interested. “Well, then, we are getting on,” she said, much pleased. “Go on being an icicle, Jack. It is the only way. Don’t for the world urge her to let you accompany her, even though I don’t like her to go alone. In the first place she would only retreat as you advanced, and in the second it would probably be salutary for her to stick among the clouds of heaven for a few hours, so I won’t worry about the Wheel.”
Jack took his hat, lying on the chair beside him. “I think I will go on down,” he said. “There is a bare possibility, you know, that I may meet Mildred. If she should be later than you expect in coming home, you would better think of me as being the trap than of the Wheel.”
“You won’t meet,” sighed Clover. “What a foolish girl she is!”
To tell the truth, Mildred could not resist a certain suspicion of her own foolishness, as she emerged upon the piazza a few seconds later, ready to start. She was conscious of disappointment that Jack was not in sight. It was a warm day, and starting off alone was not inspiriting. It required all her pride to pursue her intention.
“You won’t have a good time,” prophesied Clover, and that strengthened her waning determination; so with a light response she set forth.
The Midway was a seething mass of humanity when she reached it, and she had hardly entered the street when she met her friend, Helen Eames. The latter greeted her eagerly, and began to talk about an entertainment Mildred had attended recently with Jack at her house.
Helen was voluble, and Mildred resented the tone in which she spoke of Jack, so she parted with her friend as soon as civility permitted, and passed on.
She began to feel that she was doing an absurd thing, to be forlornly and doggedly pursuing her way among the motley crowd, to the monotonous, rhythmic beat of drum, and the sing-song of strange voices.
Above their village the South Sea Islanders were pounding out their measures from a hollow log, and across the road the daintier Javanese rang muffled music from gongs and tinkling bells. Scenes and sounds had grown familiar to Mildred, but to-day she found neither truth nor poetry in them. Indian, Turk, and Bedouin passed her by, but she kept eyes ahead on the mammoth wheel, circling with ponderous deliberation. All she wished was to keep her word, take the skyward trip, and return home.
“All the girls are delighted with Mr. Van Tassel,” Helen Eames had said.
“Silly thing! Does she suppose I will tell him?” thought Mildred, too absorbed in her own cogitations to note the “vera gooda, vera nice, vera sheep,” of the jewelry venders, the stentorian exhortations to enter the dance houses and theatres, or the incessant “hot! hot! hot!” of those that offered the thin waffle-like Zelabiah.
Mildred did not like to find in her own heart the wish that Van Tassel had been with her, that Helen Eames might see him in his proper place this morning. She must indeed have fallen from her high estate if she could wish to display an admirer to another girl. All men were her admirers. It had been a foregone conclusion so long that she had never been obliged to harbor a thought of jealousy or rivalry, and she instantly challenged and condemned this novel weakness.
The Midway Plaisance was a strange place for introspection, yet Mildred’s thoughts were sufficiently absorbing. People were always apt to turn and look a second time at her exceptionally vigorous young beauty, but she passed on to-day, totally unconscious of the glances bent upon her.
Might it be true that she had finally alienated Jack by her persistently capricious treatment? “All the girls admired him!” He did not fancy any of them, she was sure. If he cared for any woman, it was Clover; and then the girl coolly and impartially compared her gentle, sympathetic, tender sister with herself. Mildred possessed a clear head, and as she dwelt upon her own and Clover’s characteristics, a sermon seemed preached to her amid that crowded babel, in a small voice which the noisy tongues could not drown.
“How would it be possible for a man in his senses to prefer me?” she thought, raising her eyes to a delicate, bell-hung minaret that pierced the cloudless sky. This novel humility impressed her with gravity.
But she had reached her destination. She moved up with the line to the ticket office that lay directly in her path, and bought her bit of pasteboard mechanically. In a moment more the movement of her fellow-passengers had brought her to the base of the wheel. Those who have stood in that position know the effect of looking straight up. Mildred, already feeling small, experienced a painful physical sense of being overwhelmed. The monster had paused for its cars to be filled, and she shrank from the prospect before her with unprecedented sensations. If she allowed herself to be shut up in that glass cab, it meant that two flights of two hundred and fifty feet skyward must be taken ere she could regain her liberty.
“I believe I am trying to be nervous,” she said to herself coldly. “I did not know I was speaking truth to Jack this morning.”
Oh, if only she were not the vainest and most obstinate of girls, this trip would be a pleasure instead of a pain!
The faint, steady color in her cheeks faded, but she walked into the car determinedly, and taking one of its swinging chairs looked steadily through the glass front. The seats filled, the door was closed, and the scarcely perceptible motion began.
The roof of the next car began to swing into view. The inexorableness of the journey began to impress itself upon Mildred’s mind. She was trying to turn away from the thought, when a well-known voice set her beating heart to throbbing faster.
“Why, this is fortunate,” it said, with studied carelessness.
She started and lifted her eager eyes. There was Jack Van Tassel looking down upon her, triumphant, but as usual uncertain of his reception.
It has been said before that Mr. Van Tassel was a good-looking young man; but the radiance which seemed to Mildred now to invest every feature of his face, and each dark hair of his head, was certainly the figment of an excited imagination.
“Why, Jack,” she gasped, and clasped her hands tightly in her lap for fear they might tell too much.
“You are pale,” he said, and stooped with tender concern.
“Why—the sun was pretty warm, didn’t you think?” she returned.
Jack did think so. He had had considerable time in which to test it, dodging from one side of the Plaisance to the other in that crowd, where every one knows that his best friend had a faculty of dissolving from view even when he was supposed to be safely at one’s side.
“Our poor heliotrope!” he said, glancing down at their decorations.
Mildred followed his gaze. The sprays on her jacket looked, she thought, much as she felt five minutes ago. “Let us throw them away,” she answered, starting to withdraw the pin.
“Never,” said Jack promptly, and the girl hesitated, then dropped her hand.
“Turn this way,” he added. “See the University buildings,—a fine massive gray city that is going to be! Doesn’t it seem strange to think that college will ever be venerable and have traditions?”
From this time their attention was fully occupied with the panoramic view. The crowd of sightseers in the Plaisance became a congregation of umbrellas and parasols, ever lessening in size, and whitened in patches where a number of faces were upturned at once to behold the gyration of the wheel. The strange colors and shapes in architecture brought from many lands stood in startling conjunction on either hand. Beyond stretched the Fair city with its winding waterways, held safe in the great azure crescent of Lake Michigan’s embrace.
Mildred’s eyes sparkled with interest and pleasure. The color had returned to her face, and her spirits to their natural level. When their car again neared earth she was glad, not sorry, that another circuit was in prospect to help her to a more satisfactory view of what had seemed but a tantalizing glimpse.
“The deed is done,” said Jack, as at last the exit door of the car was opened, and the passengers passed from under the gigantic steel web and set foot on solid earth once more. “What is next on your programme?”
“I was going home,” answered Mildred, rather hesitatingly.
“World’s Fair finished?” asked Jack with a smile.
“I have seen almost everything in the Plaisance that I care for.”
“But I haven’t.”
“What do you mean? Are you hinting?”
The girl smiled too, and somehow her expression was not so exasperating as at other times.
“Yes, I am hinting.”
“Out with it, then. Speak up like a little man.”
“Sometimes when I have spoken up like a little man you have made me feel like a little donkey.”
“I don’t see how you can like me at all, Jack,” returned Mildred naïvely. “I made up my mind this morning that I was going to try to be more like Clover.”
“Capital scheme!” exclaimed Van Tassel, with so much enthusiasm that Mildred felt disconcerted.
“I don’t suppose the leopard can change his spots, though,” she returned, rather stiffly.
“Let us go to Hagenbeck’s and see,” suggested Jack.
“It is rather far from here if we are going to do the shows with any system.”
“Do you wish to, Mildred? Don’t let me bore you.”
“It only bores me to have you want me to be like somebody else.”
Jack’s lips drew together in an inaudible whistle, and it needed all Clover’s warnings to aid him in holding the rein over himself. They were aimlessly walking east.
“But I honestly don’t blame you,” she added. “I have done nothing to make it pleasant for you here. In your own home it didn’t seem necessary to treat you like a guest.”
“You are right. There was no necessity in the matter; there isn’t now. Perhaps you really wish to go home.”
“Clover wouldn’t go if she did wish it,” Mildred smiled at him with a sidelong glance, “and so I will stay.”
“Not with me,” said Jack, lifting his hat and looking very firm as he paused in the road.
“Then you take it back that you wish me to be like little sister?” Mildred also paused, still smiling at him with her chin lifted.
“I want you to be honest.”
“I am honest. I want to stay, you uncivil man.”