Ladies-In-Waiting

Huldah didn’t mind waiting a little matter of nineteen years, so long as her maiden flag sank in a sea of triumph at the end; and it is but simple justice to an erring but attractive woman to remark that she never said “I told you so!” to her husband.

TWO ON A TOUR

LOG-BOOK OF

CHARLOTTE AMALIA CLIFFORD

    S.S. Diana, January 21, 1918
    On the way to the Virgin Islands

I engrossed the above heading in my journal shortly after we left the dock in New York, but from what has occurred in the past few days I think my occasional entries in the log-book are likely to be records of Dorothea Valentine’s love-affairs as they occur to her day by day, and as unluckily they are poured into my ear for lack of a better or more convenient vessel.

We are dear friends, Dolly and I. Her name is Dorothea, but apparently she will have to grow up to it, for at present everybody calls her Dolly, Dora, Dot, or Dodo, according to his or her sex, color, or previous condition of servitude. Dolly is twenty and I am thirty; indeed, her mother is only forty, so that I am rather her contemporary than Dolly’s, but friendship is more a matter of sympathy than relative age, and Mrs. Valentine and I are by no means twin souls. As a matter of fact, that lady would never have noticed me, the private secretary of Clive Winthrop, a government official in Washington, had it not been that, through him and his sister, I had access to a more interesting group in society than had Mrs. Valentine, a widow of large means but a stranger in the Capital. Clive Winthrop is a person of distinction and influence, and Miss Ellen Winthrop, an old friend of my mother’s, is one of the most charming hostesses in Washington, while I am in reality nothing but a paid scribe; the glad, willing, ardent, but silent assistant of a man who is serving the Administration with all his heart; but neither he nor his sister will have it so considered. I almost think that Miss Ellen Winthrop, still vivacious and vigorous at seventy, is ready to give up to me her place as head of the household if I consent to say the word; but I am not sure enough yet to say it; and because of that uncertainty I cannot trust myself in the daily company of the two persons most deeply concerned in my decision.

A sea voyage is the best thing in the world to blow away doubts or difficulties; it also clears the air so that one can see one’s course, whether it be toward the north of duty or the south of desire.

My work for a long time has been to report interviews, take stenographic records, and write hundreds of letters for Mr. Winthrop during the somewhat protracted discussion that preceded the acquisition of the Virgin Islands by the United States. It is odd that these tasks should have fallen to me, who added below Clive Winthrop’s signature to many communications the typed initials C. A. C., for I have a special interest in these new possessions of ours, a very close and sentimental one, since I was born on St. Thomas, one of the Virgin Islands, and christened Charlotte Amalia after the little red-roofed town on the shore of the perfect harbor. My birth in St. Thomas was entirely unpremeditated, and I was taken away as soon as my mother was able to travel; nevertheless, I have always longed during the twelve years of my loneliness, without father or mother, to see the place where they were so happy in each other and so blissful in the prospect of my appearance.

I, then, have a right to this particular holiday and this opportunity to decide my future. Miss Dorothea Valentine, on the contrary, is a wholly unexpected, I will not say an unwelcome, companion, although when I wish to be thinking of my own problems she generally desires to discuss hers, which are trivial, though interesting and unique.

Everything about the girl piques interest; her beauty, her charm, her childlike gayety and inconsequence, which are but the upper current of a deeper sea of sincerity and common sense. Somebody says: “Ladies vary in looks; they’re like military flags for a funeral or a celebration—one day furled, next day streaming. Men are ships; figureheads, about the same in a storm or a calm, and not too handsome, thanks to the ocean.” The last phrases are peculiarly true of Clive Winthrop, who is sometimes called the ugliest man in Washington, yet who commands attention in any room that he enters because of his fine physique, his noble head, and his distinction of bearing and speech. Rugged he is, “thanks to the ocean,” but he looks as if he could swim against the strongest current. On the other hand, it cannot be said that Dolly Valentine varies. She is lovely at breakfast, lovelier at luncheon, and loveliest at dinner when the dazzling whiteness of her neck and shoulders is revealed. Only a tolerably generous woman would suffer herself to be in the almost daily companionship of such a charmer, and that I am in that dangerous juxtaposition is her fault, not mine.

“You must take me with you on your sea voyage, Charlotte,” she said. “I must get away from Washington and from mother. No, don’t raise your eye-brows and begin to scold before you know what I mean! I am not going to criticize my maternal parent, but I am so under her thumb at the moment that I am a flabby mass of indecision. I have no more mind than a jellyfish, yet I have to decide a matter of vital importance within a month. How can I make up a non-existent mind? Answer me that. Your life is so fixed and serene and settled; so full of absorbing work; you are so flattered and appreciated that you are like a big ship anchored in a safe harbor, and you can’t think what it’s like to be a silly little yacht bobbing about on the open sea!” (Such is the uncomprehending viewpoint of twenty toward thirty; the calm assumption that ladies of that mature age can have no love-affairs of their own to perplex them!)

“There is no need of your being a silly little yacht, Dolly!” I answered. “If you want to make a real voyage you have the power to choose your craft.”

“Mother always chooses for me,” she said with a pout. “She doesn’t gag me and put me in irons and lead me up the gangplank by brute force, but she dominates me. I start out each morning like a nice, fat, pink balloon and by evening, though I haven’t felt any violent pin-pricks, I am nothing but a little shrunken heap of shriveled rubber. You know it, Charlotte! You have seen me bouncing at breakfast and seen me flat at dinner!”

It was impossible not to laugh at her. “Don’t be ridiculous!” I expostulated. “There is nothing between you and happiness but a little cloud so diaphanous that a breath of common sense would blow it away. Now read your magazine and let me write in my log-book. It is intended to be an informal report to my chief, of the islands we are to visit. We shall be at St. Thomas to-morrow morning and in the four days we have been journeying from New York the only topic of conversation in which you have shown the slightest enthusiasm is whether you should or should not marry Marmaduke Hogg!”

“Don’t call him all of it, Charlotte,” and she shuddered. “Mother is always doing it and I can’t bear it!” whereupon she flounced about on her deck-chair and hid her face in her steamer-rug.

It was a foolish little love-story, that of Dorothea Valentine. Her mother was a mass of polite and unnecessary conventions; a pretty sort of person with a clear profile like that of a cold, old little bird. Her small, sharp nose resembled a beak; her eyes were like two black beads; and her conversation was a lengthy series of twitterings. Charlotte Clifford used to tell Miss Winthrop that if Mrs. Valentine had been a canary, people would have forever been putting a towel over her cage to secure silence. She was always idle, save for a bewildering succession of reconstruction periods, apparently forestalling ruins that no one else could have prophesied. She dieted and reduced her hips; had violet rays applied to her scalp; had her wrinkles ironed out by some mysterious process. If you caught her before ten in the morning you would find her with crescent-shaped bits of court-plaster beside her eyes, in front of her ears, and between her brows. She was beautifully clothed, shod, gloved, massaged, manicured, and marcelled. She lived on the best sides of the streets and at the proper hotels. She answered notes, returned calls, and gave wedding presents punctiliously. She never used the telephone for invitations, nor had anything but contempt for abbreviations, carefully writing out Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, when she addressed her sisters in those cities. A mass of the most glaring virtues was Mrs. Reginald Valentine, impeccable and unassailable, with views on all subjects as rigid as the laws of the Medes and Persians. She had ordered her husband’s life during their ten years of marriage, he being a gentle and artistic soul, and she had more or less directed his exercise, amusements, diet, as well as his political and religious opinions. She nursed him faithfully in his last illness, but when he timidly begged to be cremated instead of buried, she reminded him that it was a radical, ultra-modern idea; that the Valentine lot and monument were very beautiful; that there never had been any cremations in the family connection; and that she hoped he would not break a long-established custom and leave behind him a positively irreligious request. Various stories of Mr. Valentine’s docility had crept into circulation, and it is said that on this occasion he turned his head meekly to the wall and sighed: “Very well, Emma! Do just as you think best; it’s your funeral!”

Just how Dorothea blossomed on this stalk it is difficult to say. A bright-eyed, sunshiny, willful baby, she had grown into an unaffected, attractive, breezy young woman, outwardly obedient, inwardly mutinous. She was generally calm in her mother’s presence, never criticizing her openly, and her merry heart kept her from being really unhappy in a relationship that many girls would have found intolerable. Beaux she had a-plenty and lovers not a few. As cream or honey to flies, so was Dorothea Valentine to mankind in general; but she took them on gayly and cast them off lightly, little harm being done on either side by the brief experience.

Of course the suits of some of the suitors had been hard-pressed by Mrs. Valentine. “You will go through the woods to find a crooked stick at last, Dorothea,” she would say. “You don’t know a desirable parti when you see one. You must have an extraordinary opinion of your own charms to think that you have only to pick and choose. Those charms will fade, rather prematurely, I fear, and when your looked-for ideal comes along it may be that he will not regard you as flawless.”

“I don’t expect him to, mother! I only expect him to find my own flaws interesting.”

“There is no certainty of that, my dear,”—and Mrs. Valentine’s tone was touched with cynicism. “I had an intimate friend once, Clara Wyman, a very nice girl she was, who had been in love with my cousin Roger Benson for years. He seemed much attached to her and when time went by and nothing happened, I spoke to him plainly one night and asked him if he didn’t intend to propose to her, and if not, what were his reasons. What do you suppose they were?”

Mrs. Valentine’s tone implied that a shock was coming.

Dolly sat erect on her mother’s Italian day-bed as one prepared.

“I’m sure I have no idea—how could I have?” she asked.

“Roger said that he didn’t like her wiping her nose through her veil!!”

Dolly flung herself at length on the couch and buried her face in the cushions, her whole body shaking convulsively with silent mirth.

“You may laugh, Dorothea, but this incident, which I have told many times, shows how fantastic, erratic, despotic, and hypercritical men generally are. You will come to your senses some time and realize that no one is likely to bear with your perversities more patiently than Arthur Wilde or Lee Wadsworth, who have both wasted a winter dangling about you.”

Dolly raised her head, patted her hair, and wiped her streaming eyes.

“I realize the dangerous obstacles between me and the altar as I never did before,”—and the girl’s voice was full of laughter. “But I should have to lock Arthur Wilde in the basement whenever professors came to dinner. I couldn’t marry Arthur’s vocabulary, mother,—I couldn’t!”

“He is a wonderful son, and a millionaire; he has three houses, four motors, and a steam yacht!”

“Sure, but that don’t ‘enthuse me,’ ‘tremenjous’ as it sounds! (I am imitating Mr. Wilde’s style of conversation.) And as for Lee Wadsworth he is bow-legged!”

“Lee’s reputation is straight at any rate, and his income all that could be desired,” responded Mrs. Valentine loftily. “I wish I could convince you, Dorothea, that there are no perfect husbands. You are looking for the impossible! Indeed, I have always found men singularly imperfect, even as friends and companions, and in a more intimate relation they leave still more to be desired. You dismissed Sir Thomas Scott because he was too dictatorial, although you knew he intended to have the family diamonds reset for you.”

“He’d have had them reset in Sheffield or Birmingham, but, anyhow, one doesn’t marry diamonds, mother.”

“One might at least make the effort, Dorothea! I notice that most of the people who disdain diamonds generally possess three garnets, two amethysts, and one Mexican opal.”

Dolly laughed. “You know I did emulate the celebrated Mrs. Dombey, mother.”

“I know you made a very brief and feeble effort to be sensible, and you might have conquered yourself had it not been for the sudden appearance of this young Hogg on your horizon.”

“You shall not call him a young Hogg!” cried Dolly passionately. “It isn’t fair; I won’t endure it!”

“I thought that was his name,” remarked Mrs. Valentine, placidly shifting a wrinkle-plaster from one place to another. “You wouldn’t object if I had alluded to young Benham or young Wadsworth. You show by your very excitement how disagreeable his name is to your ears. It isn’t a question of argument; Marmaduke Hogg is an outrageous, offensive name; if he had been Charles or James it would have been more decent. The ‘Marmaduke’ simply calls attention to the ‘Hogg.’ If any one had asked to introduce a person named Hogg to me I should have declined.”

“I’ve told you a dozen times, mother, that the Wilmots’ house-party was at breakfast when I arrived from the night train. There was a perfect Babel and everybody was calling him ‘Duke.’ He looked like one, and nobody said—the other. I didn’t even hear his last name till evening, and then it was too late.”

“‘Too late!’ Really, Dorothea, if you have no sense of propriety you may leave the room!”—and Mrs. Valentine applied the smelling-bottle to her birdlike nose as a sign that her nerves were racked to the limit and she might at any moment succumb.

“All I know is,” continued Dorothea obstinately, “that he was the best-looking, the most interesting, the cleverest, the most companionable man in the house-party, or for that matter in the universe. You don’t ask the last name of Orlando, or Benedick, or Marcus Aurelius, or Albert of Belgium.”

“It wouldn’t be necessary.” (Here Mrs. Valentine was quite imperturbable.) “The Valentines have never been required to associate with theatrical people or foreigners. In some ways I dislike the name of Marmaduke as much as Hogg. It is so bombastic that it seems somehow like an assumed name, or as if the creature had been born on the stage. When coupled with Hogg it loses what little distinction it might have had by itself. One almost wishes it had been Marmalade. Marmalade Hogg suggests a quite nauseating combination of food, but there is a certain appropriateness about it.”

Dorothea’s face was flaming. “You will never allow Duke to explain himself, mother, nor hear me through when I attempt to make things clear to you. You never acknowledge that you know, but you do know, that Duke’s people were English a long way back, and ‘Marmaduke’ is an old family name. The Winthrops will tell you that Duke’s father and mother were named Forrest and that they changed it to Hogg to pacify an old bachelor uncle who wanted to leave Duke six thousand dollars a year. He had no voice in the matter; he was only twelve years old.”

“It was a very short-sighted business proposition, and your Duke must have been very young for his age,”—and Mrs. Valentine took another deep sniff of lavender. “Sixty thousand a year wouldn’t induce me to be named Hogg, and I shall never consent to have one in my family!”

Dorothea burst into tears, a most uncommon occurrence.

“You have dwelt so long on this purely immaterial objection,” she sobbed, “that you have finally inoculated me with something of your own feeling and made me miserable and ashamed. I dare say, too, I have hurt Duke’s pride by trying to give him a reason for your indifferent attitude, yet never having courage for the real, piffling explanation. I am mortified at my despicable weakness and I will overcome it by realizing how unworthy I am to bear Duke’s honorable, unstained name, even if it is Hogg. You might as well give up, mother! If the dearest, best, most delightful man in the world loves me, I shall marry him, name and all.”

“I do not regard it as settled,” replied Mrs. Valentine calmly. “The young man may not think you so desirable when he learns that my refusal to accept him as a son-in-law means that he must take you without any income. Your dear father must have foreseen some such tragedy when he left all his money in my care!”

“Duke will take me without a penny!” cried Dorothea hotly. “I would stake my life on that!”

“Don’t be melodramatic, Dorothea. We shall see in time. It is just possible that the young man may not be greedy, and so belie his name.” This was Mrs. Valentine’s last shaft as Dorothea walked out of the room with her chin in the air.