Daddy-Long-Legs and Dear Enemy (50 page)

But, Judy, such a dreadful thing—do you remember last year when he visited that psychopathic institution, and stayed ten days, and I made such a silly fuss about it? Oh, my dear, the impossible things I do! He went to attend his wife's funeral. She died there in the institution. Mrs. McGurk knew it all the time, and might have added it to the rest of her news, but she didn't.

He told me all about her, very sweetly. The poor man for years and years has undergone a terrible strain, and I fancy her death is a blessed relief. He confesses that he knew at the time of his marriage that he ought not to marry her, he knew all about her nervous instability; but he thought, being a doctor, that he could overcome it, and she was beautiful! He gave up his city practice and came to the country on her account. And then after the little girl's birth she went all to pieces, and he had to “put her away,” to use Mrs. McGurk's phrase. The child is six now, a sweet, lovely thing to look at, but, I judge from what he said, quite abnormal. He has a trained nurse with her always. Just think of all that tragedy looming over our poor patient good doctor, for he is patient, despite being the most impatient man that ever lived!

Thank Jervis for his letter. He's a dear man, and I'm glad to see him getting his deserts. What fun we are going to have when you get back to Shadywell, and we lay our plans for a new John Grier! I feel as though I had spent this past year learning, and am now just ready to begin. We'll turn this into the nicest orphan-asylum that ever lived. I'm so absurdly happy at the prospect that I start in the morning with a spring, and go about my various businesses singing inside.

The John Grier Home sends its blessings to the two best friends it ever had!

SALLIE.

THE JOHN GRIER HOME,
Saturday at half-past six in the morning!

“Some day soon something nice is going to happen.”

Weren't you surprised when you woke up this morning and remembered the truth? I was! I couldn't think for about two minutes what made me so happy.

It's not light yet, but I'm wide awake and excited and having to write to you. I shall despatch this note by the first to-be-trusted little orphan who appears, and it will go up on your breakfast tray along with your oatmeal.

I shall follow
very promptly
at four o'clock this afternoon. Do you think Mrs. McGurk will ever countenance the scandal if I stay two hours, and no orphan for a chaperon?

It was in all good faith, Sandy, that I promised not to kiss your hand or drip tears on the counterpane, but I'm afraid I did both—or worse! Positively, I didn't suspect how much I cared for you till I crossed the threshold and saw you propped up against the pillows, all covered with bandages, and your hair singed off. You are a sight! If I love you now, when fully one third of you is plaster of Paris and surgical dressing, you can imagine how I'm going to love you when it's all you!

But my dear, dear Robin, what a foolish man you are! How should I ever have dreamed all those months that you were caring for me when you acted so abominably SCOTCH? With most men, behavior like yours would not be considered a mark of affection. I wish you had just given me a glimmering of an idea of the truth, and maybe you would have saved us both a few heartaches.

But we mustn't be looking back; we must look forward and be grateful. The two happiest things in life are going to be ours, a
friendly
marriage and work that we love.

Yesterday, after leaving you, I walked back to the asylum sort of dazed. I wanted to get by myself and
think,
but instead of being by myself, I had to have Betsy and Percy and Mrs. Livermore for dinner (already invited) and then go down and talk to the children. Friday night—social evening. They had a lot of new records for the victrola, given by Mrs. Livermore, and I had to sit politely and listen to them. And, my dear—you'll think this funny—the last thing they played was “John Anderson, my joe John,”
⁵¹
and suddenly I found myself crying! I had to snatch up the nearest orphan and hug her hard, with my head buried in her shoulder, to keep them all from seeing.

I wonder, when we are old and bent and tottery, can you and I look back, with no regrets, on monie a canty day we've had wi' ane anither? It's nice to look forward to, isn't it—a life of work and play and little daily adventures side by side with somebody you love? I'm not afraid of the future any more. I don't mind growing old with you, Sandy. “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.”

The reason I've grown to love these orphans is because they need me so, and that's the reason—at least one of the reasons—I've grown to love you. You're a pathetic figure of a man, my dear, and since you won't make yourself comfortable, you must be
made
comfortable.

We'll build a house on the hillside just beyond the asylum—how does a yellow Italian villa strike you, or preferably a pink one? Anyway, it won't be green. And it won't have a mansard roof. And we'll have a big cheerful living-room, all fireplace and windows and view, and no McGURK. Poor old thing! won't she be in a temper and cook you a dreadful dinner when she hears the news! But we won't tell her for a long, long time—or anybody else. It's too scandalous a proceeding right on top of my own broken engagement. I wrote to Judy last night, and with unprecedented self-control I never let fall so much as a hint. I'm growing Scotch mysel'!

Perhaps I didn't tell you the exact truth, Sandy, when I said I hadn't known how much I cared. I think it came to me the night the John Grier burned. When you were up under the blazing roof, and for the half hour that followed, when we didn't know whether or not you would live, I can't tell you what agonies I went through. It seemed to me, if you did go, that I would never get over it all my life; that somehow to have let the best friend I ever had pass away with a dreadful chasm of misunderstanding between us—well—I couldn't wait for the moment when I should be allowed to see you and talk out all that I have been shutting inside me for five months. And then—you know that you gave strict orders to keep me out; and it hurt me dreadfully. How should I suspect that you really wanted to see me more than any of the others, and that it was just that terrible Scotch moral sense that was holding you back? You are a very good actor, Sandy. But, my dear, if ever in our lives again we have the tiniest little cloud of a misunderstanding, let's promise not to shut it up inside ourselves, but to
talk.

Last night, after they all got off,—early, I am pleased to say, since the chicks no longer live at home,—I came up-stairs and finished my letter to Judy, and then I looked at the telephone and struggled with temptation. I wanted to call up 505 and say good night to you. But I didn't dare. I'm still quite respectably bashful! So, as the next best thing to talking to you, I got out Burns and read him for an hour. I dropped asleep with all those Scotch love-songs running in my head, and here I am at daybreak writing them to you.

Good-by, Robin lad, I lo'e you weel.

SALLIE.

 

 

 

THE END

Explanatory Notes

Thanks to my research assistant, Adena Spingarn, Princeton'03, who helped with the introduction and the preparation of these notes and also consulted the Webster archive at Vassar.

1
Michael Angelo:
Michelangelo (1475-1564) was an Italian painter, sculptor, and poet.

2
Maurice Maeterlinck:
Successful dramatist and poet (1862- 1949), known as the “Belgian Shakespeare.”

3
Second Punic war:
One of the wars between Rome and Carthage in the third and second centuries B.C.E. over control of Sicily. Specifically, the second, lasting from 218 to 201 B.C.E., was called the “Hannibalic War,” which ended in the complete triumph of Rome.

4
Three Musketeers:
1844 novel by French writer Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870).

5
Mother Goose ... Rudyard Kipling: Mother Goose
is the traditional designation for a body of nursery rhymes, some dating back to the seventeenth or early eighteenth century. Although this is most likely the work Judy means by “Mother Goose,” the term was also popularized by French author Charles Perrault (1628- 1703) in the subtitle of his 1697 fairy tale collection,
Stories and Tales from the Past: Tales of Mother Goose,
which included his now standard versions of stories such as “Cinderella” and “Blue Beard.”
David Copperfield
is the 1849 novel by the English writer Charles Dickens (1812-1870).
Ivanhoe
is the 1819 novel by Scottish poet and novelist Walter Scott (1771-1832).
The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe
(1719) is a novel by English novelist and journalist Daniel Defoe (1660-1731).
Jane Eyre
is the 1847 novel by English novelist Charlotte Brontë (1816- 1855); see also note 41, below.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
(1865) is a fantasy novel by Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832-1898). Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) was a British author born in Bombay who merged the east and the west in his stories and poems.

6
Henry the Eighth:
Henry VIII (1491-1547) ruled England from 1 509-1 547 and was married six times.

7
Shelley:
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was an English Romantic poet.

8
Robert Louis Stevenson:
Scottish-born author (1850-1894).

9
George Eliot:
Pen name for English novelist Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880).

10
Mona Lisa:
Painting—and one of the most recognizable images in the world—by Italian artist Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519).

11
Sherlock Holmes:
Detective protagonist in a number of popular novels and stories by Scottish-born writer Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930).

12
Tennyson's poems:
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892), was the poet laureate of England.

13
Vanity Fair:
1848 novel of the Napoleonic Wars by English novelist William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863).

14
Plain Tales:
Rudyard Kipling's 1887 collection of short stories about India.

15
Little Women:
Beloved 1868 novel about four spunky sisters by American author Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888).

16
pickled limes:
An item from
Little Women.
Made with limes and salt, they are exchanged among the schoolgirls as a symbolic measure of friendship.

17
Matthew Arnold's poems:
Arnold (1822-1888) was an English poet and critic.

18
Judge not that ye be not judged:
Matthew 7:1.

19
Richard Feverel: The Ordeal of Richard Feverel
(1859) by British novelist and poet George Meredith (1823-1909). The novel tells the story of a proud, opinionated father who tries to turn his son into a perfect state of manhood through a repressive system of education.

20
Emerson's “Essays”:
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), American poet and essayist, wrote a series of essays based on lectures he gave during the 1840s.

21
Lockhart's “Life of Scott”:
John Gibson Lockhart (1794-1854), Scottish writer and editor, was Walter Scott's son-in-law. His multivolume biography of Scott was considered one of the most impressive life histories in the English language.

22
Gibbon's “Roman Empire”:
English historian Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) wrote a multi-volume history of the Roman Empire,
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(1776-1788).

23
Benvenuto's Cellini's “Life”:
Cellini (1500-1571), Italian artist, metalsmith, and sculptor, wrote an autobiography of his romantic adventures.

24
Livy:
Roman historian (59 B.C.E.-C.E. 17).

25
De Senectute . . . De Amicitia:
Works by Roman orator and politician Marcus Tullus Cicero (106-43 B.C.E.).

26
Wuthering Heights :
English novelist Emily Brontë (1818-1848) wrote this 1847 novel, a saga of two Yorkshire families and a passionate love story.

27
Heathcliffe:
Heathcliff was the Byronic and darkly glamorous hero of
Wuthering Heights.

28
pie-plant:
The old-fashioned name for rhubarb.