Angela's Business Part 1

Angela's Business.

by Henry Sydnor Harrison.

I

Being an author actually at work, and not an author being photographed at work by a lady admirer, he did not gaze large-eyed at a poppy in a crystal vase, one hand lightly touching his forehead, the other tossing off page after page in high G.o.dlike frenzy. On the contrary, the young man at the table yawned, lolled, sighed, scratched his ear, read s.n.a.t.c.hes of Virginia Carter's "Letters to My Girl Friends" in the morning's "Post," read s.n.a.t.c.hes of any printed matter that happened to be about, and even groaned. When he gazed, it was at no flower, but more probably at his clock, a stout alarm-clock well known to the trade as "Big Bill"; and the clock gazed back, since there was a matter between them this evening, and seemed to say, "Well, are you going to the Redmantle Club, or are you _not_?" But that was precisely the point on which the young man at the table had not yet made up his mind.

Of course, if he went to the Redmantle Club, he could not possibly spend the whole evening here, writing, and, oddly enough, this was at once a cogent reason for staying away from the Redmantle Club, and a seductive argument for going to the same. No lady admirer could ever grasp this paradox, but every true writer must admit that I know his secret perfectly.

From time to time, no diversion offering, the author would read over the last sentence he had written, which very likely ran as follows:--

We have a society organized on the agreeable a.s.sumption that every woman, at twenty-five or thereabouts, finds herself in possession of a home, a husband, and three darling little curly-headed children.

Stimulated a trifle, he would thereupon sharpen up his pencil and charge forward a few sentences, as now:--

Slipshod people never test such old a.s.sumptions against actuality; they cling to what their grandfathers said, and call their slipshodness conservatism. So (like ostriches) they avoid the fact that there are three large and growing cla.s.ses of women who simply have no relation to their comfortable old theory. I refer, of course, to the cla.s.ses of Temporary Spinsters, of Permanent Spinsters, and of Married but Idle--childless wives living in boarding-houses, for example.

Let no Old Tory conceive that he has disposed of the Woman Question until he can plainly answer: What are all these various women to DO in their fifteen waking hours a day?

Following which, he lit a cigarette in a moody manner, and sat frowning at the back of the head of his relative and secretary, who was clacking away all the while on a second-hand typewriter near by.

It will be contended that some hesitancy was fitting enough to the writer's thesis, Woman having raised perplexities in the bosoms of philosophers from the earliest times on. But perplexity did not happen to be the trouble with this philosopher, Charles King Garrott. These sentences Mr. Garrott so apathetically set down were the ancient commonplaces of his mind, the familiar bare bones of special researches long holding a unique position in his life. The dull General Public, with its economic eye, might yet rate him merely as a private tutor, formerly of Blaines College; the relative and secretary there might judge him only a young man of an unmasculine thin sedentary quality, who mysteriously gave his youth to producing piles of strange stuff that all had to be copied out on the typewriter. But, in the privacy of his own soul, Charles Garrott was, through all, not alone the coming American novelist (which rather went without saying), but, in that direct connection, probably the only man in the world who really understood Woman.

Old times used this phrase unscientifically; "understanding women" has acquired misleading connotations. The words seem to call up the picture of a purely gallant observer, one with a polished mustache and amorous gay eyes, sitting under a sidewalk awning and ogling out over a purplish drink. We may go so far as to state plainly that they call up the picture of a Frenchman. The young man at the table is scarcely imagined as this sort of authority, viewing Woman crudely as La Femme. As he could not put pencil to paper without revealing, Charles Garrott viewed Woman, never as La Femme, but exclusively as a Question. Himself the New Man obviously, he saw Woman solely as a Movement, meditated about her strictly as an Unrest. When he considered her in the concrete--and that he seldom did nowadays, if we need not count his friend, Mary Wing, who was as New as he, to say the least of it--his eye reviewed and criticized her, not as a s.e.x, but strictly as a human being against an environment. Charles Garrott would scientifically diagnose a Woman to her face, in a manner which she, poor creature, but little suspected.

Romance [he began again] left us with the sentimental tradition that a w----

"Charles!" said his relative and secretary, speaking for the first time in ten minutes, a long silence for him--"I'll thank you for your attention a moment."

"Certainly, Judge," said Charles Garrott, with that alacrity with which a true writer habitually welcomes an interruption.

"Here, near the end of this story--pa.s.sage I can't for the life of me.... Here! Seems to go like this: 'Let a man,' cried Dionysius, cracking walnuts with a sort of splendid sadness, 'but free his eyes from the magic of s.e.x, and mask my words'--no!--let's see--'_mark_ my words, Bishop, he shall see strange truths.'"

There was a pause.

"Mistake somewhere!" said the gentleman at the typewriter, with a chuckle. "Well, what's what?"

"No, that's right, I believe. Why, what's the matter with it?"

"Why!--there's no sense in it!"

"Oh--it's advanced talk, you know. Modern, epigrammatic stuff, you might call it."

"Conceding that, here's the bit about the nuts. That's where the mistake is, _I_ claim. Let me see--'cracking walnuts with a sort of _splendid_ sadness.' Good gad,--that can't be right, Charles! 'Sober sadness,'

'sorrowful sadness'--something of that sort you meant, eh?"

The secretary had swung about suddenly, revealing a face almost startlingly handsome, fine-cut as a cameo, pink and white as a professional beauty's, and topped with a magnificent crown of snow-white hair.

"'Pathetic sadness,' now, my dear fellow? Go just a little better, wouldn't it?"

"Well--no, Judge, not just in this particular story. Fact is, it's meant to be a little queer, you see."

"It _is_ queer, that's my point!" said the Judge, rather worried.

"'Cracking walnuts with a sort of splendid sadness'--if the public understands _that_!--Well, as you like, of course."

Having thus washed his hands of all responsibility, the relative gazed a moment at a little red "Nothing But Business, Please" sign that hung above his typewriter-table, hummed a bar or two in a sweet tenor voice, and resumed his now expert clacking.

Similarly his employer resumed his composition:--

Romance left us with the sentimental tradition that a woman's s.e.x was a complete, indeed a glorious, justification of her existence (_v._ F. Dell: "Women as World Builders"). Because she some day would be, or might possibly be, a mother of children, she was set upon a pedestal and left there, exempt from further responsibilities meanwhile. The potentiality of motherhood became a claim to life-long support in idleness, etc., etc.--

Now, we have long understood that the controlling fact in the life of every man is the way in which he gets his living. We have long understood that the essential immorality is to get something for nothing. But only lately have we come to see how these two general laws apply, have always applied, to women.

Only late--

But there the pencil, which had been dragging, came again to a halt.

This writing went forward in an old exercise-book, on the label of which a fine trembling hand had written "_French Composition_." It was seen that firmer fingers had overwritten that inscription with another: "NOTES ON WOMEN." Here, in brief, the authority was reducing certain views to essay form, according to a plan he had: squeezing out the meat of his mind into the exercise-book, as the moral basis of a great new novel, nothing less. And the truth was that he had no sooner begun the stock-taking process than difficulties appeared, and the present want of ardor made itself felt. Faint doubts and questionings, indeed, knocked at Charles Garrott's mind in these days; not touching Woman, of course, but certainly seeming to touch his last year's formula for her. "I'm an ultra-modern with conservative reactions," he had thought to himself, with a sense of important discovery, but a night or two ago. And on the whole, he felt that that had explained him scientifically into the best company in the world.

The reference was to the one other existing person who, it was conceded, might possibly know as much about Woman as he, Charles, did. That one was a lady in Sweden. And, rea.s.suringly enough, he had long since noted in the Swedish lady's bold modernism, also, this precise same tendency toward judicious reconsideration.

Suddenly the young man put away his writing, shut his table-drawer with a click, and said:--

"I'm going out for awhile, Judge--to a meeting of the Redmantle Club.

Think I need a little stimulus."

He went away to the bedroom, thinking, but not of the Redmantle Club, for which, to say truth, he cared little. Nor were his thoughts in line with the swingeing sentences he had just been writing in the exercise-book. On the contrary, the young authority was openly inquiring of himself: _Was_ economic independence the complete solution of the Unrest? _Were_ there no Values in the world but Utilitarian Values?

The bedroom door shut, and Judge Blenso, who had replied with a mere busy nod to Charles's announcement, desisted from his clacking, and produced a late copy of "The Rider and Driver" from the little drawer of his typewriter-table. He began to look at pictures with a happy expression upon his striking face.

Why was Mr. Blenso called the Judge? An interesting point, on which I, for one, unluckily can shed no light. But if he has also been called a relative and secretary, that was for the sake of peace only. To say outright that this fine large gentleman was Charles Garrott's nephew (his half-nephew, to be exact) would necessitate a vast deal of explanatory genealogy. That was a fact, as the family Bibles of the Blensos and Minters clearly proved, but it is a fact that had better be quietly ceded. Judge Blenso was a relative, and it is quite true that his young half-uncle had been reared from infancy to address him as Uncle George. Garrott, who had no other nephew in the world, had always thought it a little unfair.

The Judge's disaster had come upon him in the prime of a gallant widowerhood. He had dived from an unfamiliar pier, one luckless day, in the interests of a stout young woman, who flattered herself that she was drowning. Diving too close to avoid her bulk, Charles's relative had struck his head upon a submerged beam which should not have been there; and the stout young woman, so far from drowning, had promptly proved that she could float enough for two. She had saved her rescuer's life, in short.

But the beam had had the last word in the encounter, after all. When Uncle George Blenso got well of his concussion, it was early discovered that he was just a little "different"; also that his nominal Real Estate and Loans business downtown was far, far from solvent. It was accordingly proposed in the family that Uncle George should go to the Garrott place in Prince William County; but this proposal had been rejected at once by Uncle George, who protested indignantly that he was a city man. The upshot was that Charles, being the only city relative extant, had invited the Judge to share his third floor here, turning out his young friend and room-mate, Donald Manford, for that express purpose. That had seemed to settle the issue. But no; very soon the lively kinsman was pointing out that he would need money, of course, for clothes, club-dues, and so on, and accordingly it was arranged that he should become Charles's literary a.s.sistant on a regular salaried basis.

It happened that Charles had as yet had occasion to publish but a single fiction ("The Truth About Jennie"; see "Favorite Magazine," for August, 1910). He had, indeed, as much need of a private chaplain as of a secretary. The peculiarities of the case, thus, often struck and amused him; and they did so now as, opening the door of the bedroom, hatted and coated, he saw his secretary's still youthful head bowed pleasantly over the magazine.

"Ah, my dear fellow, there you are!" said the secretary, with just a little jump.

And putting down his reading-matter in a manner suggesting that, of course, he had had to kill time somehow while waiting for Charles, he went on at once in an agreeable confidential voice:--

"By the by, I intended to ask you--you've heard about this Miss Trevenna? Gad, you know, Charles! Her father won't let her name be mentioned!"

The employer eyed him gravely, pulling on his gloves. The story alluded to was not unknown to him: how one modern girl, claiming more Freedom than existed, had too rashly crossed the great gulf, and how, her enterprise proving fatally unsuccessful, she had lately come home again.

He felt very sorry for Miss Trevenna.

"Fact!--her mother visits her in secret, in lodgings," said his secretary, dropping his eager voice further. "A sad case--sad, yes--but, my dear fellow, can we allow our girls to run off with other people's husbands? No! Morals," said Judge Blenso, sternly, "are the bulwark of the nation!--that's what _I_ say! Am I right, Charles?"