Dear Enemy (21 page)

I remember when I first woke in that harbor. I felt like a heroine of grand opera surrounded by untruly beautiful painted scenery. Nothing in my four trips to Europe ever thrilled me like the queer sights and tastes and smells of those three warm weeks seven years ago. And ever since, I've panted to get back. When I stop to think about it, I can hardly bring myself to swallow our unexciting meals; I wish to be dining on curries and tamales and mangos. Isn't it funny? You'd think I must have a dash of Creole or Spanish or some warm blood in me somewhere, but I'm nothing on earth but a chilly mixture of English and Irish and Scotch. Perhaps that is why I hear the South calling. "The palm dreams of the pine, and the pine of the palm."

After seeing you off, I turned back to New York with an awful wander-thirst gnawing at my vitals. I, too, wanted to be starting off on my travels in a new blue hat and a new blue suit with a big bunch of violets in my hand. For five minutes I would cheerfully have said good-by forever to poor dear Gordon in return for the wide world to wander in. I suppose you are thinking they are not entirely incompatible--Gordon and the wide world--but I don't seem able to get your point of view about husbands. I see marriage as a man must, a good, sensible workaday institution; but awfully curbing to one's liberty. Somehow, after you're married forever, life has lost its feeling of adventure. There aren't any romantic possibilities waiting to surprise you around each corner.

The disgraceful truth is that one man doesn't seem quite enough for me. I like the variety of sensation that you get only from a variety of men. I'm afraid I've spent too flirtatious a youth, and it isn't easy for me to settle.

I seem to have a very wandering pen. To return: I saw you off, and took the ferry back to New York with a horribly empty feeling. After our intimate, gossipy three months together, it seems a terrible task to tell you my troubles in tones that will reach to the bottom of the continent. My ferry slid right under the nose of your steamer, and I could see you and Jervis plainly leaning on the rail. I waved frantically, but you never blinked an eyelash. Your gaze was fixed in homesick contemplation upon the top of the Woolworth Building.

Back in New York, I took myself to a department store to accomplish a few trifles in the way of shopping. As I was entering through their revolving doors, who should be revolving in the other direction but Helen Brooks! We had a terrible time meeting, as I tried to go back out, and she tried to come back in; I thought we should revolve eternally. But we finally got together and shook hands, and she obligingly helped me choose fifteen dozen pairs of stockings and fifty caps and sweaters and two hundred union suits, and then we gossiped all the way up to Fifty-second Street, where we had luncheon at the Women's University Club.

I always liked Helen. She's not spectacular, but steady and dependable. Will you ever forget the way she took hold of that senior pageant committee and whipped it into shape after Mildred had made such a mess of it? How would she do here as a successor to me? I am filled with jealousy at the thought of a successor, but I suppose I must face it.

"When did you last see Judy Abbott?" was Helen's first question.

"Fifteen minutes ago," said I. "She has just set sail for the Spanish main with a husband and daughter and nurse and maid and valet and dog."

"Has she a nice husband?"

"None better."

"And does she still like him?"

"Never saw a happier marriage."

It struck me that Helen looked a trifle bleak, and I suddenly remembered all that gossip that Marty Keene told us last summer; so I hastily changed the conversation to a perfectly safe subject like orphans.

But later she told me the whole story herself in as detached and impersonal a way as though she were discussing the characters in a book. She has been living alone in the city, hardly seeing any one, and she seemed low in spirits and glad to talk. Poor Helen appears to have made an awful mess of her life. I don't know any one who has covered so much ground in such a short space of time. Since her graduation she has been married, has had a baby and lost him, divorced her husband, quarreled with her family, and come to the city to earn her own living. She is reading manuscript for a publishing house.

There seems to have been no reason for her divorce from the ordinary point of view; the marriage just simply didn't work. They weren't friends. If he had been a woman, she wouldn't have wasted half an hour talking with him. If she had been a man, he would have said: "Glad to see you. How are you?" and gone on. And yet they MARRIED. Isn't it dreadful how blind this sex business can make people?

She was brought up on the theory that a woman's only legitimate profession is homemaking. When she finished college, she was naturally eager to start on her career, and Henry presented himself. Her family scanned him closely, and found him perfect in every respect--good family, good morals, good financial position, good looking. Helen was in love with him. She had a big wedding and lots of new clothes and dozens of embroidered towels. Everything looked propitious.

But as they began to get acquainted, they didn't like the same books or jokes or people or amusements. He was expansive and social and hilarious, and she wasn't. First they bored, and then they irritated, each other. Her orderliness made him impatient, and his disorderliness drove her wild. She would spend a day getting closets and bureau drawers in order, and in five minutes he would stir them into chaos. He would leave his clothes about for her to pick up, and his towels in a messy heap on the bathroom floor, and he never scrubbed out the tub. And she, on her side, was awfully unresponsive and irritating,--she realized it fully,--she got to the point where she wouldn't laugh at his jokes.

I suppose most old-fashioned, orthodox people would think it awful to break up a marriage on such innocent grounds. It seemed so to me at first; but as she went on piling up detail on detail each trivial in itself, but making a mountainous total, I agreed with Helen that it was awful to keep it going. It wasn't really a marriage; it was a mistake.

So one morning at breakfast, when the subject of what they should do for the summer came up, she said quite casually that she thought she would go West and get a residence in some State where you could get a divorce for a respectable cause; and for the first time in months he agreed with her.

You can imagine the outraged feelings of her Victorian family. In all the seven generations of their sojourn in America they have never had anything like this to record in the family Bible. It all comes from sending her to college and letting her read such dreadful modern people as Ellen Key and Bernard Shaw.

"If he had only got drunk and dragged me about by the hair," Helen wailed, "it would have been legitimate; but because we didn't actually throw things at each other, no one could see any reason for a divorce."

The pathetic part of the whole business is that both she and Henry were admirably fitted to make some one else happy. They just simply didn't match each other; and when two people don't match, all the ceremonies in the world can't marry them.

Saturday morning.

I meant to get this letter off two days ago; and here I am with volumes written, but nothing mailed.

We've just had one of those miserable deceiving nights--cold and frosty when you go to bed, and warm and lifeless when you wake in the dark, smothered under a mountain of blankets. By the time I had removed my own extra covers and plumped up my pillow and settled comfortably, I thought of those fourteen bundled-up babies in the fresh-air nursery. Their so-called night nurse sleeps like a top the whole night through. (Her name is next on the list to be expunged.) So I roused myself again, and made a little blanket removing tour, and by the time I had finished I was forever awake. It is not often that I pass a NUIT BLANCHE; but when I do, I settle world problems. Isn't it funny how much keener your mind is when you are lying awake in the dark?

I began thinking about Helen Brooks, and I planned her whole life over again. I don't know why her miserable story has taken such a hold over me. It's a disheartening subject for an engaged girl to contemplate. I keep saying to myself, what if Gordon and I, when we really get acquainted, should change our minds about liking each other? The fear grips my heart and wrings it dry. But I am marrying him for no reason in the world except affection. I'm not particularly ambitious. Neither his position nor his money ever tempted me in the least. And certainly I am not doing it to find my life work, for in order to marry I am having to give up the work that I love. I really do love this work. I go about planning and planning their baby futures, feeling that I'm constructing the nation. Whatever becomes of me in after life, I am sure I'll be the more capable for having had this tremendous experience. And it IS a tremendous experience, the nearness to humanity that an asylum brings. I am learning so many new things every day that when each Saturday night comes I look back on the Sallie of last Saturday night, amazed at her ignorance.

You know I am developing a funny old characteristic; I am getting to hate change. I don't like the prospect of having my life disrupted. I used to love the excitement of volcanoes, but now a high level plateau is my choice in landscape. I am very comfortable where I am. My desk and closet and bureau drawers are organized to suit me; and, oh, I dread unspeakably the thought of the upheaval that is going to happen to me next year! Please don't imagine that I don't care for Gordon quite as much as any man has a right to be cared for. It isn't that I like him any the less, but I am getting to like orphans the more.

I just met our medical adviser a few minutes ago as he was emerging from the nursery--Allegra is the only person in the institution who is favored by his austere social attentions. He paused in passing to make a polite comment upon the sudden change in the weather, and to express the hope that I would remember him to Mrs. Pendleton when I wrote.

This is a miserable letter to send off on its travels, with scarcely a word of the kind of news that you like to hear. But our bare little orphan asylum up in the hills must seem awfully far away from the palms and orange groves and lizards and tarantulas that you are enjoying.

Have a good time, and don't forget the John Grier Home

and

SALLIE.

December 11. Dear Judy:

Your Jamaica letter is here, and I'm glad to learn that Judy, Junior, enjoys traveling. Write me every detail about your house, and send some photographs, so I can see you in it. What fun it must be to have a boat of your own that chugs about those entertaining seas! Have you worn all of your eighteen white dresses yet? And aren't you glad now that I made you wait about buying a Panama hat till you reached Kingston?

We are running along here very much as usual without anything exciting to chronicle. You remember little Maybelle Fuller, don't you--the chorus girl's daughter whom our doctor doesn't like? We have placed her out. I tried to make the woman take Hattie Heaphy instead,--the quiet little one who stole the communion cup,--but no, indeed! Maybelle's eyelashes won the day. After all, as poor Marie says, the chief thing is to be pretty. All else in life depends on that.

When I got home last week, after my dash to New York, I made a brief speech to the children. I told them that I had just been seeing Aunt Judy off on a big ship, and I am embarrassed to have to report that the interest--at least on the part of the boys-- immediately abandoned Aunt Judy and centered upon the ship. How many tons of coal did she burn a day? Was she long enough to reach from the carriage house to the Indian camp? Were there any guns aboard, and if a privateer should attack her, could she hold her own? In case of a mutiny, could the captain shoot down anybody he chose, and wouldn't he be hanged when he got to shore?

I had ignominiously to call upon Sandy to finish my speech. I realize that the best-equipped feminine mind in the world can't cope with the peculiar class of questions that originate in a thirteen-year boy's brain.

As a result of their seafaring interest, the doctor conceived the idea of inviting seven of the oldest and most alert lads to spend the day with him in New York and see with their own eyes an oceanliner. They rose at five yesterday morning, caught the 7:30 train, and had the most wonderful adventure that has happened in all their seven lives. They visited one of the big liners (Sandy knows the Scotch engineer), and were conducted from the bottom of the hold to the top of the crow's-nest, and then had luncheon on board. And after luncheon they visited the aquarium and the top of the Singer Building, and took the subway uptown to spend an hour with the birds of America in their habitats. Sandy with great difficulty pried them away from the Natural History Museum in time to catch the 6:15 train. Dinner in the dining-car. They inquired with great particularity how much it was costing, and when they heard that it was the same, no matter how much you ate, they drew deep breaths and settled quietly and steadily to the task of not allowing their host to be cheated. The railroad made nothing on that party, and all the tables around stopped eating to stare. One traveler asked the doctor if it was a boarding school he had in charge; so you can see how the manners and bearing of our lads have picked up. I don't wish to boast, but no one would ever have asked such a question concerning seven of Mrs. Lippett's youngsters. "Are they bound for a reformatory?" would have been the natural question after observing the table manners of her offspring.

My little band tumbled in toward ten o'clock, excitedly babbling a mess of statistics about reciprocating compound engines and watertight bulkheads, devil-fish and sky-scrapers and birds of paradise. I thought I should never get them to bed. And, oh, but they had had a glorious day! I do wish I could manage breaks in the routine oftener. It gives them a new outlook on life and makes them more like normal children. Wasn't it really nice of Sandy? But you should have seen that man's behavior when I tried to thank him. He waved me aside in the middle of a sentence, and growlingly asked Miss Snaith if she couldn't economize a little on carbolic acid. The house smelt like a hospital.