He dropped in three days ago and stayed for tea, really in almost his old friendly mood. But he has since stiffened up again to the same man of granite we knew all summer. I've given up trying to make him out. I suppose, however, that any one might be expected to be a bit down with a wife in an insane asylum. I wish he'd talk about it once. It's awful having such a shadow hovering in the background of your thoughts and never coming out into plain sight.
I know that this letter doesn't contain a word of the kind of news that you like to hear. But it's that beastly twilight hour of a damp November day, and I'm in a beastly uncheerful mood. I'm awfully afraid that I am developing into a temperamental person, and Heaven knows Gordon can supply all the temperament that one family needs! I don't know where we'll land if I don't preserve my sensibly stolid, cheerful nature.
Have you really decided to go South with Jervis? I appreciate your feeling (to a slight extent) about not wanting to be separated from a husband; but it does seem sort of hazardous to me to move so young a daughter to the tropics.
The children are playing blind man's buff in the lower corridor. I think I'll have a romp with them, and try to be in a more affable mood before resuming my pen.
A BIENTOT! SALLIE.
P.S. These November nights are pretty cold, and we are getting ready to move the camps indoors. Our Indians are very pampered young savages at present, with a double supply of blankets and hot-water bottles. I shall hate to see the camps go; they have done a lot for us. Our lads will be as tough as Canadian trappers when they come in.
November 20.
Dear Judy:
Your motherly solicitude is sweet, but I didn't mean what I said.
Of course it's perfectly safe to convey Judy, junior, to the temperately tropical lands that are washed by the Caribbean. She'll thrive as long as you don't set her absolutely on top of the equator. And your bungalow, shaded by palms and fanned by sea breezes, with an ice machine in the back yard and an English doctor across the bay, sounds made for the rearing of babies.
My objections were all due to the selfish fact that I and the John Grier are going to be lonely without you this winter. I really think it's entrancing to have a husband who engages in such picturesque pursuits as financing tropical railroads and developing asphalt lakes and rubber groves and mahogany forests. I wish that Gordon would take to life in those picturesque countries; I'd be more thrilled by the romantic possibilities of the future. Washington seems awfully commonplace compared with Honduras and Nicaragua and the islands of the Caribbean.
I'll be down to wave good-by.
ADDIO! SALLIE.
November 24.
Dear Gordon:
Judy has gone back to town, and is sailing next week for Jamaica, where she is to make her headquarters while Jervis cruises about adjacent waters on these entertaining new ventures of his. Couldn't you engage in traffic in the South Seas? I think I'd feel pleasanter about leaving my asylum if you had something romantic and adventurous to offer instead. And think how beautiful you'd be in those white linen clothes! I really believe I might be able to stay in love with a man quite permanently if he always dressed in white.
You can't imagine how I miss Judy. Her absence leaves a dreadful hole in my afternoons. Can't you run up for a week end soon? I think the sight of you would be very cheering, and I'm feeling awfully down of late. You know, my dear Gordon, I like you much better when you're right here before my eyes than when I merely think about you from a distance. I believe you must have a sort of hypnotic influence. Occasionally, after you've been away a long time, your spell wears a little thin. But when I see you, it all comes back. You've been away now a long, long time; so, please come fast and bewitch me over again!
S.
December 2.
Dear Judy:
Do you remember in college, when you and I used to plan our favorite futures, how we were forever turning our faces southward? And now to think it has really come true, and you are there, coasting around those tropical isles! Did you ever have such a thrill in the whole of your life, barring one or two connected with Jervis, as when you came up on deck in the early dawn and found yourself riding at anchor in the harbor of Kingston, with the water so blue and the palms so green and the beach so white?
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.
I must tell you that Punch is back with us again, entirely renovated as to manners. I am looking for a family to adopt him.
I had hoped those two intelligent spinsters would see their way to keeping him forever, but they want to travel, and they feel he's too consuming of their liberty. I inclose a sketch in colored chalk of your steamer, which he has just completed. There is some doubt as to the direction in which it is going; it looks as though it might progress backward and end in Brooklyn. Owing to the loss of my blue pencil, our flag has had to adopt the Italian colors.
The three figures on the bridge are you and Jervis and the baby. I am pained to note that you carry your daughter by the back of her neck, as if she were a kitten. That is not the way we handle babies in the J. G. H. nursery. Please also note that the artist has given Jervis his full due in the matter of legs. When I asked Punch what had become of the captain, he said that the captain was inside, putting coal on the fire. Punch was terribly impressed, as well he might be, when he heard that your steamer burned three hundred wagonloads a day, and he naturally supposed that all hands had been piped to the stokehole.
BOW! WOW!
That's a bark from Sing. I told him I was writing to you, and he responded instantly.
We both send love.
Yours,
SALLIE. THE JOHN GRIER HOME,
Saturday.
Dear Enemy:
You were so terribly gruff last night when I tried to thank you for giving my boys such a wonderful day that I didn't have a chance to express half of the appreciation I felt.
What on earth is the matter with you, Sandy? You used to be a tolerably nice man—in spots, but these last three or four months you have only been nice to other people, never to me. We have had from the first a long series of misunderstandings and foolish contretemps, but after each one we seemed to reach a solider basis of understanding, until I had thought our friendship was on a pretty firm foundation, capable of withstanding any reasonable shock.
And then came that unfortunate evening last June when you overheard some foolish impolitenesses, which I did not in the slightest degree mean; and from then on you faded into the distance. Really, I have felt terribly bad about it, and have wanted to apologize, but your manner has not been inviting of confidence. It isn't that I have any excuse or explanation to offer; I haven't. You know how foolish and silly I am on occasions, but you will just have to realize that though I'm flippant and foolish and trivial on top, I am pretty solid inside; and you've got to forgive the silly part. The Pendletons knew that long ago, or they wouldn't have sent me up here. I have tried hard to pull off an honest job, partly because I wanted to justify their judgment, partly because I was really interested in giving the poor little kiddies their share of happiness, but mostly, I actually believe, because I wanted to show you that your first derogatory opinion of me was ill founded. Won't you please expunge that unfortunate fifteen minutes at the porte-cochere last June, and remember instead the fifteen hours I spent reading the Kallikak Family?
I would like to feel that we're friends again.
SALLIE McBRIDE.
THE JOHN GRIER HOME,
Sunday.
Dear Dr. MacRae:
I am in receipt of your calling card with an eleven-word answer to my letter on the back. I didn't mean to annoy you by my attentions. What you think and how you behave are really matters of extreme indifference to me. Be just as impolite as you choose.
S. McB.
December 14.
Dear Judy:
PLEASE pepper your letters with stamps, inside and out. I have thirty collectors in the family. Since you have taken to travel, every day about post time an eager group gathers at the gate, waiting to snatch any letters of foreign design, and by the time the letters reach me they are almost in shreds through the tenacity of rival snatchers. Tell Jervis to send us some more of those purple pine trees from Honduras; likewise some green parrots from Guatemala. I could use a pint of them!
Isn't it wonderful to have got these apathetic little things so enthusiastic? My children are getting to be almost like real children. B dormitory started a pillow fight last night of its own accord; and though it was very wearing to our scant supply of linen, I stood by and beamed, and even tossed a pillow myself.
Last Saturday those two desirable friends of Percy's spent the whole afternoon playing with my boys. They brought up three rifles, and each man took the lead of a camp of Indians, and passed the afternoon in a bottle shooting contest, with a prize for the winning camp. They brought the prize with them—an atrocious head of an Indian painted on leather. Dreadful taste; but the men thought it lovely, so I admired it with all the ardor I could assume.
When they had finished, I warmed them up with cookies and hot chocolate, and I really think the men enjoyed it as much as the boys; they undoubtedly enjoyed it more than I did. I couldn't help being in a feminine twitter all the time the firing was going on for fear somebody would shoot somebody else. But I know that I can't keep twenty-four Indians tied to my apron strings, and I never could find in the whole wide world three nicer men to take an interest in them.
Just think of all that healthy, exuberant volunteer service going to waste under the asylum's nose! I suppose the neighborhood is full of plenty more of it, and I am going to make it my business to dig it out.
What I want most are about eight nice, pretty, sensible young women to come up here one night a week, and sit before the fire and tell stories while the chicks pop corn. I do so want to contrive a little individual petting for my babies. You see, Judy, I am remembering your own childhood, and am trying hard to fill in the gaps.
The trustees' meeting last week went beautifully. The new women are most helpful, and only the nice men came. I am happy to announce that the Hon. Cy Wykoff is visiting his married daughter in Scranton. I wish she would invite father to live with her permanently.
Wednesday.
I am in the most childish temper with the doctor, and for no very definite reason. He keeps along his even, unemotional way without paying the slightest attention to anything or anybody. I have swallowed more slights during these last few months than in the whole of my life before, and I'm developing the most shockingly revengeful nature. I spend all my spare time planning situations in which he will be terribly hurt and in need of my help, and in which I, with the utmost callousness, will shrug my shoulders and turn away. I am growing into a person entirely foreign to the sweet, sunny young thing you used to know.
Evening.
Do you realize that I am an authority on the care of dependent children? Tomorrow I and other authorities visit officially the Hebrew Sheltering Guardian Society's Orphan Asylum at Pleasantville. (All that's its name!) It's a terribly difficult and roundabout journey from this point, involving a daybreak start and two trains and an automobile. But if I'm to be an authority, I must live up to the title. I'm keen about looking over other institutions and gleaning as many ideas as possible against our own alterations next year. And this Pleasantville asylum is an architectural model.
I acknowledge now, upon sober reflection, that we were wise to postpone extensive building operations until next summer. Of course I was disappointed, because it meant that I won't be the center of the ripping-up, and I do so love to be the center of ripping-ups! But, anyway, you'll take my advice, even though I'm no longer an official head? The two building details we did accomplish are very promising. Our new laundry grows better and better; it has removed from us that steamy smell so dear to asylums. The farmer's cottage will finally be ready for occupancy next week. All it now lacks is a coat of paint and some doorknobs.
But, oh dear! oh dear! another bubble has burst! Mrs Turnfelt, for all her comfortable figure and sunny smile, hates to have children messing about. They make her nervous. And as for Turnfelt himself, though industrious and methodical and an excellent gardener, still, his mental processes are not quite what I had hoped for. When he first came, I made him free of the library. He began at the case nearest the door, which contains thirty-seven volumes of Pansy's works. Finally, after he had spent four months on Pansy, I suggested a change, and sent him home with "Huckleberry Finn." But he brought it back in a few days, and shook his head. He says that after reading Pansy, anything else seems tame. I am afraid I shall have to look about for some one a little more up-and-coming. But at least, compared with Sterry, Turnfelt is a scholar!
And speaking of Sterry, he paid us a social call a few days ago, in quite a chastened frame of mind. It seems that the "rich city feller" whose estate he has been managing no longer needs his services; and Sterry has graciously consented to return to us and let the children have gardens if they wish. I kindly, but convincingly, declined his offer.
Friday.
I came back from Pleasantville last night with a heart full of envy. Please, Mr. President, I want some gray stucco cottages, with Luca della Robbia figures baked into the front. They have nearly 700 children there, and all sizable youngsters. Of course that makes a very different problem from my hundred and seven, ranging from babyhood up. But I borrowed from their superintendent several very fancy ideas. I'm dividing my chicks into big and little sisters and brothers, each big one to have a little one to love and help and fight for. Big sister Sadie Kate has to see that little sister Gladiola always has her hair neatly combed and her stockings pulled up and knows her lessons and gets a touch of petting and her share of candy—very pleasant for Gladiola, but especially developing for Sadie Kate.
Also I am going to start among our older children a limited form of self-government such as we had in college. That will help fit them to go out into the world and govern themselves when they get there. This shoving children into the world at the age of sixteen seems terribly merciless. Five of my children are ready to be shoved, but I can't bring myself to do it. I keep remembering my own irresponsible silly young self, and wondering what would have happened to me had I been turned out to work at the age of sixteen!
I must leave you now to write an interesting letter to my politician in Washington, and it's hard work. What have I to say that will interest a politician? I can't do anything any more but babble about babies, and he wouldn't care if every baby was swept from the face of the earth. Oh, yes, he would, too! I'm afraid I'm slandering him. Babies—at least boy babies—grow into voters.
Good-by,
SALLIE.
Dearest Judy:
If you expect a cheerful letter from me the day, don't read this.