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Who Cares ?
A STORY OF ADOLESCENCE
by Cosmo Hamilton
TO
MY YOUNG BROTHER
ARTHUR
WHO PLAYS THE GAME
"Another new novel?"
"Well,--another novel."
"What's it about?"
"A boy and a girl."
"A love story?"
"Well,-- it's about a boy and a girl."
"Do they marry?"
"I said it was about a boy and a girl."
"And are they happy?"
"Well,-- it's a love story."
"But all love stories aren't happy!"
"Yes they are,-- if it's love."
CONTENTS
PART ONE
SPRING IN THE WORLD
PART TWO
THE ROUND-ABOUT
PART THREE
THE GREAT EMOTION
PART FOUR
THE PAYMENT
I
SPRING IN THE WORLD AND ALL THINGS FOR THE YOUNG
Birds called. Breezes played among branches just bursting into green. Daffodils, proud and erect, stood in clumps about the dazzling lawn. Young, pulsing, eager things elbowed their way through last year's leaves to taste the morning sun; the wide-eyed celandine, yellower than butter; the little violet, hugging the earth for fear of being seen; the sturdy bourgeois daisy; the pale- faced anemone, earliest to wake and earliest to sleep; the blue bird's-eye in small family groups; the blatant dandelion already a head and shoulders taller than any neighbor. Every twig in the old garden bore its new load of buds that were soft as kittens' paws; and up the wrinkled trunks of ancient trees young ivy leaves chased each other like school-boys.
Spring had come again, and its eternal spirit spread the message of new-born hope, stirred the sap of awakening life, warmed the bosom of a wintry earth and put into the hearts of birds the old desire to mate. But the lonely girl turned a deaf ear to the call, and rounded her shoulders over the elderly desk with tears blistering her letter.
"I'm miserable, miserable," she wrote. "There doesn't seem to be anything to live for. I suppose it's selfish and horrid to grumble because Mother has married again, but why did she choose the very moment when she was to take me into life? Oh, Alice, what am I to do? I feel like a rabbit with its foot in a trap, listening to the traffic on the main road--like a newly fledged bird brought down with a broken wing among the dead leaves of Rip Van Winkle's sleeping-place. You'll laugh when you read this, and say that I'm dramatizing my feelings and writing for effect; but if you've got any heart at all, you'd cry if you saw me (me of all girls!) buried alive out here without a single soul to speak to who's as young as I am--hushed if I laugh by mistake, scowled at if I let myself move quickly, catching old age every hour I stay here."
"Why, Alice, just think of it! There's not a person or a thing in and out of this house that's not old. I don't mean old as we thought of it at school, thirty and thirty-five, but really and awfully old. The house is the oldest for miles round. My grandfather is seventy- two, and my grandmother's seventy. The servants are old, the trees are old, the horses are old; and even the dogs lie about with dim eyes waiting for death."
"When Mother was here, it was bearable. We escaped as often as we could, and rode and drove and made secret visits to the city and saw the plays at matinees. There's nothing old about Mother. I suppose that's why she married again. But now that I'm left alone in this house of decay, where everybody and everything belongs to the past, I'm frightened of being so young, and catch looks that make me feel that I ought to be ashamed of myself. It's so long since I quarreled with a girl or flirted with a boy that I can't remember it. I'm forgetting how to laugh. I'm beginning not to care about clothes or whether I look nice."
"One day is exactly like another. I wander about aimlessly with nothing to do, nowhere to go, no one to speak to. I've even begun to give up reading novels, because they make me so jealous. It's all wrong, Alice. It's bad and unhealthy. It puts mutinous thoughts into my head. Honestly, the only way in which I can get the sort of thrill that I ought to have now, if ever I am to thrill at all, is in making wild plans of escape, so wild and so naughty that I don't think I'd better write about them, even to you, dear."
"Mother's on her honeymoon. She went away a week ago in a state of self-conscious happiness that left Grandfather and Grandmother snappy and disagreeable. She will be away four months, and every weekly letter that comes from her will make this place more and more unbearable and me more restless and dangerous. I could get myself invited away. Enid would have me and give me a wonderful time. She has four brothers. Fanny has begged me to stay with her in Boston for the whole of the spring and see and do everything, which would be absolutely heaven. And you know everybody in New York and could make life worth living."
"But Grandfather won't let me go. He likes to see me about the house, he says, and I read the papers to him morning and evening. It does me good, he considers, to 'make a sacrifice and pay deference to those whose time is almost up.' So here I am, tied to the shadows, a prisoner till Mother comes back--a woman of eighteen forced to behave like a good little girl treated as if I were still content to amuse myself with dolls and picture books! But the fire is smolderin Alice, and one fine day it will burst into flame."
A shaft of sunlight found its way through the branches of a chestnut tree and danced suddenly upon the envelope into which Joan had sealed up this little portion of her overcharged vitality. Through the open windows of her more than ample room with its Colonial four- post bed, dignified tallboys, stiff chairs and anemic engravings of early-Victorianism, all the stir and murmur of the year's youth came to Joan.
If her eyes had not been turned inward and her ears had not been tuned only to catch her own natural complaints, this chatter of young things would have called her out to laugh and tingle and dance in the haunted wood and cry out little incoherent welcomes to the children of the earth. Something of the joy and emotion of that mother-month must have stirred her imagination and set her blood racing through her young body. She felt the call of youth and the urge to play. She sensed the magnetic pull of the voice of spring, but when, with her long brown lashes wet with impatient tears, she went to the window and looked out at the green spread of lawn and the yellow-headed daffodils, it seemed more than ever to her that she was peering through iron bars into the playground of a school to which she didn't belong. She was Joan-all-alone, she told herself, and added, with that touch of picturesque phrasing inherited from her well-read mother, that she was more like a racing motorboat tied to a crumbling wharf in a deserted harbor than anything else in the world.
There was a knock on her door and the sound of a bronchial cough. "Come in," she said and darted an anxious look at the blond fat face of the clock on the mantelshelf. She had forgotten all about the time.
It was Gleave who opened the door, Gleave the bald-headed manservant who had grown old along with his master with the same resentfulness- -the ex-prizefighter, sailor, lumberman and adventurer who had thrown in his lot with Cumberland Ludlow, the sportsman, when both were in the full flush of middle age. His limp, the result of an epoch-making fight in an Australian mining camp, was emphasized by severe rheumatism, and the fretfulness of old age was heightened by his shortness of breath.
He got no further than: "Your grandfather--"
"I know," said Joan. "I'm late again. And there'll be a row, I suppose. Well, that will break the monotony, at any rate." Seizing the moment when Gleave was wrestling with his cough, she slipped her letter into her desk, rubbed her face vigorously with her handkerchief and made a dart at the door. Grandfather Ludlow demanded strict punctuality and made the house shake if it failed him. What he would have said if he could have seen this eager, brown-haired, vivid girl, built on the slim lines of a wood nymph, swing herself on to the banisters and slide the whole way down the wide stairway would have been fit only for the appreciative ears of his faithful man. As it was, Mrs. Nye, the housekeeper, was passing through the hall, and her gasp at this exhibition of unbecoming athletics was the least that could be expected from one who still thought in the terms of the crinoline and had never recovered from the habit of regarding life through the early-Victorian end of the telescope.
Joan slipped into Mr. Cumberland Ludlow's own room, shut the door quickly and picked her way over the great skins that were scattered about the polished floor.
"Good morning, Grandfather," she said, and stood waiting for the storm to break. She knew by heart the indignant remarks about the sloppiness of the younger generation, the dire results of modern anarchy and the universal disrespect that stamped the twentieth century, and set her quick mind to work to frame his opening sentence.
But the old man, whose sense of humor was as keen as ever, saw in the girl's half-rebellious, half-deferential attitude an impatient expectation of his usual irritation, and so he merely pointed a shaking finger at the clock. His silence was far more eloquent and effective than his old-fashioned platitudes. He smiled as he saw her surprise, indicated a chair and gave her the morning paper. "Go ahead, my dear," he said.
Sitting bolt upright, with her back to the shaded light, her charming profile with its little blunt nose and rounded chin thrown up against the dark glistening oak of an old armoire, Joan began to read. Her clear, high voice seemed to startle the dead beasts whose heads hung thickly around the room and bring into their wide, fixed eyes a look of uneasiness.
Several logs were burning sulkily in the great open fireplace, throwing out a pungent, juicy smell. The aggressive tick of an old and pompous clock endeavored to talk down the gay chatter of the birds beyond the closed windows. The wheeze of a veteran Airedale with its chin on the head of a lion came intermittently.
They made a picture, these two, that fitted with peculiar rightness into the mood of Nature at that moment. Youth was king, and with all his followers had clambered over winter and seized the earth. The red remainders of autumn were almost over-powered. Standing with his hands behind him and his back to the fire, the old sportsman listened, with a queer, distrait expression, to the girl's reading. That he was still putting up a hard fight against relentless Time was proved by his clothes, which were those of a country-lover who dressed the part with care. A tweed shooting-coat hung from his broad, gaunt shoulders. Well-cut riding breeches, skin tight below his knees, ran into a pair of brown top-boots that shone like glass. A head and shoulders taller than the average tall man, his back was bent and his chest hollow. His thin hair, white as cotton wool, was touched with brilliantine, and his handsome face, deeply lined and wrinkled, was as closely shaved as an actor's after three o'clock. His sunken eyes, overshadowed by bushy brows, had lost their fire. He could no longer see to read. He too heard the call without, and when he looked at the young, sweet thing upon whom he was dependent for the news, and glanced about the room so full of memories of his own departed youth, he said to himself with more bitterness than usual: "I'm old; I'm very old, and helpless; life has no use for me, and it's an infernal shame."
Joan read on patiently, glancing from time to time at the man who seemed to her to be older than the hills, startlingly, terribly old, and stopped only when, having lowered himself into his arm-chair, he seemed to have fallen asleep. Then, as usual, she laid the paper aside, eager to be up and doing, but sat on, fearful of moving. Her grandfather had a way of looking as though he would never wake up again, and of being as ready as a tiger to pounce upon her if she tried to slip away. She would never forget some of the sarcastic things he had said at these times, never! He seemed to take an unexplainable delight in making her feel that she had no right to be so young. He had never confided to her the tragedy of having a young mind and an old body, young desires and winter in his blood. He had never opened the door in his fourth wall and let her see how bitterly he resented having been forced out of life and the great chase, to creep like an old hound the ancient dogs among. He had never let her suspect that the tragedy of old age had hit him hard, filling his long hours with regret for what he might have done or done better. Perhaps he was ashamed to confess these things that were so futile and so foolish. Perhaps he was afraid to earn a young incredulous laugh at the pathetic picture of himself playing Canute with the on-coming tide of years. He was not understood by this girl, because he had never allowed her to get a glimpse into his heart; and so she failed to know that he insisted upon keeping her in his house, even to the point of extreme selfishness, because he lived his youth over again in the constant sight of her. What a long and exquisite string of pearls there could be made of our unspoken words!
The logs glowed red; the hard tick of the pompous clock marked off the precious moments; and outside, spring had come. But Joan sat on with mutinous thoughts, and the man who not so long ago had stalked the beasts whose heads and skins were silent reminders of his strength, lay back in his chair with nodding head.
"He's old," she said to herself, "dreadfully, awfully old, and he's punishing me for being young. Oh! It's wicked, it's wicked. If only I had a father to spoil me and let me live! If only Mother hadn't forgotten all about me in her own happiness! If only I had money of my own and could run away and join the throng!"
She heard a sigh that was almost a groan, turned quickly and saw two slow tears running down her grandfather's face. He had been kicking against the pricks again and had hurt his foot.
With all the elaborate care of a Deerslayer, Joan got up, gave the boards that creaked a wide berth--she knew them all--and tiptoed to the door. The fact that she, at eighteen years of age, a full-grown woman in her own estimation, should be obliged to resort to such methods made her angry and humiliated. She was, however, rejoicing at one thing. Her grandfather had fallen asleep several pages of the paper earlier than usual, and she was to be spared from the utter boredom of wading through the leading articles which dealt with subways and Tammany and foreign politics and other matters for which she had a lofty contempt. She was never required to read the notices of new plays and operas and the doings of society, which alone were interesting to her and made her mouth water.
