A Case of Intellectuality

I

IT had been a “Byron afternoon.” Mrs. G. M. Higginbotham had given a somewhat shy and embarrassed account of the poet’s early life. The shyness was a family trait; the embarrassment arose from the distressing indelicacy attached to the recounting of certain incidents which to her were not — as she put it — nice, great though the poet might be. There had been a reading by Miss Ellen Thorpe, — she had breathed out, with much expressive curving of her white fingers, The Isles of Greece. Her elocution came out especially effectively in her reference to “bur-r-r-ning Sappho.” Mrs. Hiram Coleman’s nervous and abashed efforts had gone to the illumination of Byron, the Poet. She read with lightning speed, and stumblingly, glancing up occasionally, more to beseech, with her meek eyes, clemency than to accentuate any Byronic point. When she sat relievedly down, she whispered to Miss Ellen Thorpe that she got it all from the encyclopædia, because it seemed so much better than anything she could do. And, as a finality, Mrs. Nelson — the president of the “Fisherville Literary Circle ” — had read a long and excellently constructed paper on The Power of Conscience as Displayed in Byron’s Poetry. Mrs. Kitchell and the Thorpe girls — all the unmarried women in Fisherville were girls — had yawned at least twenty times during the reading, though, to be sure, at the end, they had been alert with “My dear, how clever;” and “You do those profound things so well, Mrs. Nelson.”

There was a rustle of consummation, — of things done and accomplished. The Circle, with the exception of Mrs. Nelson, felt, not unnaturally, that, as individuals and as a body, they had put a footprint on the sands of culture. Therefore, for a fortnight, they could, comparatively, take their ease and not worry lest the march of female progress should escape them. Mrs. Kitchell, the hostess, retired to the pantry to see that her daughter Mattie got the cream from the freezer without getting rock salt in it. During the “refreshments” the Circle talked with gossipy animation of topics somewhat more local in character than Byron, the Poet.

Mrs. Nelson felt a restless dissatisfaction over the afternoon. It had been the result of her long, eagerly hopeful labor that the Literary Circle had been established; she had gone about from house to house, fairly, to interest her fellow townswomen in this idea of a little group of cultured women really desirous of “knowing good things,” as she put it to them. They had, on the instant, responded with easy alacrity, and at the initial meeting had turned out to the number of twenty-five. The Presbyterian minister, Dr. Hackett, had come in and given them a little talk, that first day, on the duty of Christian Womanhood toward the things that make for Broad Culture. Later in the year the number had dwindled, for one reason or another, to avariable seven. And all this had undermined Mrs. Nelson’s enthusiasm.

Well, it was disheartening. It was bad enough, Mrs. Nelson thought, to live in Fisherville, Wisconsin, but so to disregard utterly one’s brain —

Mrs. Nelson frowned wearily. She was very tired. She had worked tremendously on her paper, — and, after all, what was the use — in Fisherville ? She dropped down into a chair, — apart from the others, — resentful of a life so barren, so enervating. Mattie, Mrs. Kitchell’s daughter, inquired of Mrs. Nelson, as she passed the fig cake, why Paula did not come, too.

Her tone was slightly acid. Mrs. Nelson flushed guiltily.

“She was detained at home,” she replied quietly.

“I guess Paula does n’t care much about books and things, does she?” returned Mattie triumphantly. It gratified her to see Mrs. Nelson’s effort at a dignified hedging of the subject of Paula’s taste. Mattie tossed her head.

“You’re not going?” presently said Mrs. Kitchell to Mrs. Nelson with loud regret. “Oh, don’t; why, I thought that just as soon as the refreshments were out of the way we could play euchre for the rest of the afternoon. Now that the programme is over,” she added with a slightly deprecating accent. Fisherville always stood a little in awe of Mrs. Nelson and her intellectuality. Though James Nelson, a Fisherville boy, in the pride of his young Eastern wife, had brought her to them fully fifteen years ago, they still felt deferential to her brains.

“I must,” Mrs. Nelson returned a little hurriedly. She felt she must get away to be alone with herself, — the long walk home in the dusk suddenly attracted her. “You know,” she added, by way of explanation, “the young man I spoke to you about—my brother-in-law’s young friend, Mr. Risley, the one who has been ill with nervous prostration — is coming to-night. He’s to stay with us till he gets entirely rested out.”

“It’ll be fine for Paula,” Mrs. Kitchell said half enviously, her eyes on Mattie, “to have a nice young man around.”

“Oh,” said Mrs. Nelson helplessly. “Oh, — I don’t— Well, good-by. The Circle meets with Mrs. Coleman next time, you know. It’s Matthew Arnold then, is n’t it?”

Paula met her at the door — pretty, slender, appealing little Paula — in a fresh white blouse, her curling yellow hair escaping from its elaborate pompadour arrangement in alluring little tendrils.

“Come in, lady. Aren’t you almost dead with your old literary circle ? Did Mattie Kitchell say, ‘Why did n’t Paula come to-day ?’” — she mimicked the nasal tones of Mattie so accurately that her mother laughed in spite of herself, — “and did you have ‘refreshments’?”

“Paula — stop. I wish you ” —

“Now, mother, don’t be tiresome. I would n’t belong to the old thing for anything in the world! He’s come,” she added, nodding toward the stairway. “He’s in his room.”

“Not Mr. Risley!” Mrs. Nelson was dismayed.

Paula nodded. “He got here sooner than he expected. He’s very tired, he says, and went to his room. — Oh yes, I gave him clean towels, and his fire is lighted. Really, he’s not bad looking, but he’s frightfully serious.”

“Seriousness, my dear, is a good quality in young men,” Mrs. Nelson responded with reproof.

II

Egbert Risley was wont to say to a listener — usually a married woman of sympathies — that he seemed to himself destined to work out, agonizingly, in his own soul, every phase of belief and disbelief that had vexed human nature for ages. This largeness of conception undeniably excited in his confidantes a kind of domestic awe freely infused with maternal pity. They felt, not unnaturally, in the face of so exalted and so tremendous a destiny, a desire to succor.

His arrival at the Nelsons’ — after the wretchedness of his prostration — was coincident with the period in which Risley was inclined to regard marriage as the white man’s burden, and to consider a life of celibacy best suited to lofty intellectual attainment. It was natural, therefore, that he should regard Paula with very little more than an absent, preoccupied eye. Indeed, the first evening after tea with the Nelsons, while Paula played excellent rag-time in the parlor, Risley sat with her mother, gratefully, in the living-room and induced the talk to the point of declaration that all passion and fire had been burned out of him long ago. Risley, it must be confessed, was twenty-seven.

In spite of herself Mrs. Nelson was impressed, for Risley was not a man to be taken lightly.

“Oh, Mr. Risley — I’m — I’m sure you are exaggerating. ” She attempted — for Paula had pointed out to her often the position of the true mother — a slight maternal pleasantry: “Some day some charming girl will appear and steal your heart, and then” —

But he regarded her soberly. “My dear Mrs. Nelson, I would not have you imagine that I am not in sympathy with marriage for others, but you must know that, for myself, I believe the highest mentality would not be served by an alliance with a wife! ”

It was a wedge. Mrs. Nelson’s emancipation had not compassed intellectual celibacy. She was inclined to argue the point from an honest, old-fashioned conception of marriageable young men. In the midst of a discussion that forced her mind as never before to its full pace she remembered her duty as Paula’s mother. She had a guilty feeling of doing Paula out of her recreations. The piano-playing was growing irritable, too.

“Paula will want— Would n’t you care to go into the parlor and let Paula play for you ? ” she hesitated.

Afterward she felt a brief sense of shame for the interruption. Risley was courteous enough in his refusal, and, now that she had broken the thread of their talk, he went to his room.

“What on earth,” demanded Paula later, “were you and Mr. Risley talking about so confidentially?” Mrs. Nelson imagined she detected resentment, and answered with hasty apology.

“ He was talking about ”— she decided hastily to omit particulars— “ about some of his plans. He spoke of you, too,— how pretty and alive you were, Paula; he’s an unusual young man.”

“Unusual because he says I am pretty ? — Oh, no, mamma! But you mean he’s got brains, I suppose. Is n’t it a pity, dear, that I’m not intellectual, too ? ” and Paula departed, singing.

Mrs. Nelson sighed.

That evening was the beginning of a community of mental interests between Risley and Mrs. Nelson. It was not arrived at simply on her part; for there was always Paula and her duty. Not since the years before her marriage, when, as a girl, she had the freedom of a great author’s house, had she felt so in the atmosphere of things worth while. The impetus of it all brought a new light into her eyes — still good after forty-eight years — and a responsiveness into her carriage. Paula noticed it curiously; and Ellen Thorpe admitted to Mrs. Kitchell that Mrs. Nelson was certainly looking a good deal better than she had since she’d known her. The flat little blue bonnet that had successfully defied the fashions for ten years was sent to the milliner’s for an aigrette and a bit of lace. She spoke shyly to Paula of the matter of renovating her gray poplin, her wedding gown. It was a period for Mrs. Nelson.

For the first week Mrs. Nelson made it easy for Risley to escape, and warmed to his good breeding when he did not profit by her unselfishness. She offered up Paula as a topic, but, after a courteous interval, Risley turned firmly to the abstract. They talked, brain to brain, for hours, Mrs. Nelson letting out the repressed thought of years, and Risley expanding under his own power to stimulate. This was the real tournament, — not that callow game of sighs and glances to which the unthinking world gave first place. They were differentiated man and woman by point of view, by subtle differences of attitude toward art and life: that was sufficient for piquancy. Her age to Risley only gave her the advantage.

In the thick of this talk Mrs. Nelson was wont at first, conscience-stricken at the youthful attention she was monopolizing, to retreat with something like, “I am sorry my daughter is not here; she would so like to hear what you have said about Wagner’s music.”

“He was very kind to an elderly woman,” she made herself say afterwards, when some unsubdued remnant of vanity would have suggested that she had indeed appeared well.

Risley came more and more frequently to sit with her. Sometimes Paula monopolized him, but more often she was content to have him talk to her mother while she amused herself otherwise, — very much as she used to give her nurse the big doll to hold while she played with the little dolls. But he was always “my Mr. Risley ” to Mattie Kitchell and the Thorpe girls, even if she obviously cared more for him as a fact than as a companion.

Once, after Paula had insisted on dragging Risley out for a walk, she was generous enough to explain to her mother: “And he likes you, mamma; he thinks you are quite unusual. And he was n’t saying it just, to please me, either.”

Mrs. Nelson took the crumb gratefully. Life with Paula tended to subdue fastidiousness in the matter of praise.

When Risley did talk with Paula it was with a manner that suggested a half smile. He grew in time to have a pleasant feeling for her in the geniality of his surroundings, and spoke of her to her mother as “the child.”

In such manner the beautiful intimacy grew.

Nothing could exceed Mrs. Nelson’s pride in the afternoon at the Circle when Risley — he had consented delightfully — read a paper on Matthew Arnold and His Relation to the Times. Its erudition and its diction were immensely impressive. And the full instant came when she overheard Risley telling Mattie Kitchell that he had rarely met a finer or more original brain than Mrs. Nelson’s.

At the tea - table that night Paula opened fire.

“Mother, you ought to be ashamed of yourself to drag poor Mr. Risley up to that awful literary thing of yours. Poor man, he looks fairly plucked. How can you do it ? You know perfectly well that Mrs. Kitchell and Mattie and the Thorpe girls are just about intelligent enough to” —

“Paula,” besought Mrs. Nelson, flushing.

“Indeed, Miss Paula” — began Risley.

“Now, Mr. Risley, I know you were just bored to death. I went once, and I give you my word that I nearly died. Ellen Thorpe recited Tennyson while Mattie Kitchell tried to count the tucks in my shirt waist, and the rest slept.”

“ Paula, dear, Mr. Risley himself read a charming paper on Arnold. I regret that you did not hear it; it was one of the best meetings we ever had. I wish ” —

“My dear Miss Paula, it seems to me, really, that the Circle, which your mother has spent so much labor on, is a wonderful witness to her great worth. I think one ought to take advantage of every opportunity of culture. Fisherville is fortunate in having your mother.”

Paula laughed, unabashed.

Mrs. Nelson gave Risley a glance warm with humility and pleasure. So it was not strange, when they were alone that evening, — for Paula had gone to a dancing party, —that they two should revert to the subject of Paula.

It came out, after hesitation and maternal shame, — Mrs. Nelson’s confession.

“I don’t know how to say it,” she began.

Risley was kind. “You can say anything, Mrs. Nelson, that is in your mind. I never knew a woman more gifted with the power of expression. Tell me—I shall understand.”

“Yes, I think you will,” she said emboldened. “Oh, it is wicked to think it, even. But — but — it’s Paula. She — she is such a disappointment to me.”

He nodded gravely, and she continued, uplifted by the opportunity to open her gates.

“She disappoints me. She irritatesme. You’ll think I’m an unnatural mother. I am, perhaps. But she has failed me at every turn. Her father — my husband — was a man of wonderful kindness and great physical charm. I loved him as a girl, but later — when he brought me here — it — my love — vanished slowly. We were never mentally akin. Never read together, or talked, really talked, together. It was enough that I was his wife. When Paula came I hoped so much, — I wanted her to be my kind. I dreamed about the days to come when we should be more than mother and child, when we should be friends. I gave her all myself, — read to her, put myself into her life, tried to give her a point of view, — yet little by little I saw it all coming, — just as it is now. We’ve nothing in common, nothing. Oh, how I have shrunk from it!”

Risley’s rather prominent blue eyes were moist; his loose childish mouth curved with sympathy.

“My dear Mrs. Nelson!”

“It’s silly of me to cry out like this. But sometimes — Fisherville is trying at best —when Paula breaks out, as she did to-night, I can’t bear it. It seems to me that since you have been in the house living has doubled its value. You’ve been like a rain on a dry garden. Oh, I’ve starved so long,—you can’t think the joy it is to have some one to talk to, some one who does n’t think I’m old — and — and foolish.” She stopped with a pathetic little laugh.

Risley’s sympathy was grateful as he reassured and calmed and encouraged.

“But surely Paula will marry?” he said at length.

“It is my only hope. She’s so pretty. Yes, she’ll marry. I hope she’ll marry a man of her own kind, — some one who will love her and care for her and think she is perfect— Some one without brains,” she finished slowly.

He smiled at her. He gave her, in his gentle regard, such a sense of her possession of him. She felt almost girlishly elated over his acceptance of her secret.

Whatever happened, now he understood her, and was not ashamed.

“Yes,” he responded, “preferably some one without brains.”

Mrs. Nelson added with a smile that was rueful: “ If the man that Paula marries ever found out what I have said to you of myself, my feeling toward her, how he would hate me, — even though he might begin with a certain affection for Paula’s mother.”

“It would be a brute that hated you, dear Mrs. Nelson.”

She loved him for his sense of her little tragedy.

III

It was late in the dinner; the fairy lamps on either end of the table had begun to flicker. The Thorpe girls were wondering whether Mrs. Kitchell would actually be so stylish as to have black coffee, and if so, whether they would have to drink it without cream. The occasion — in honor of Risley—was eventful, for evening dinners in Fisherville were a little precious; and it was, too, rather bewildering. Mrs. Nelson and Risley had assumed control early; they had talked, to be sure, over the head of Fisherville, yet Fisherville admitted their unquestionable superiority, — all save Paula. She resented being, as she put it to herself, shut out in the cold. Besides, Mattie Kitchell had observed the kindly snubs that Risley had unwittingly administered to Paula.

After all, it was black coffee; and during the leisurely elegance of it, Paula took matters into her own hands. She spoke with a confiding air of ownership.

“Mr. Risley, Mattie and I have been thinking that it would be lovely to give a little dance at Fisher’s Hall on the tenth. It’s leap year, you know, and so we girls are going to invite the men. Will you go with me ?”

It was daring; Fisherville gasped.

Risley’s eyes sought Mrs. Nelson with a light of understanding. That lady was between shame and confidence. He smiled gently as he shook his head.

“Indeed, Miss Paula, you honor me exceedingly, but, unfortunately, I am obliged to decline the gracious invitation. For the truth is, your mother and I have made a delightful little plan of our own for that very date.”

Fisherville rubbed its hands in secret joy. Competition between mother and daughter was excitingly new; but for the mother to win, — well, that was scandalously worth hearing. Nor did it fail to note Paula’s angry red face.

It was like Mrs. Nelson on the way home to say with an eager humility: “Please, Mr. Risley, don’t think of me in this matter. I’m an old woman, and I must n’t assume too much. If Paula — you understand — our little plan” —

His courtly response was the best thing in the world.

“My dear Mrs. Nelson, I assure you that nothing could come up to make me prefer any pleasure to our hearing of the Merchant of Venice.”

Not in years had anything so appealed as Risley’s suggestion that the two of them go to Chicago on the tenth, hear a famous pair of actors in the Merchant, and return late that night to Fisherville. In the succeeding fortnight Mrs. Nelson was buoyant. The gray poplin was indeed beautifully reconstructed. The forgotten sound of orchestras was in her ears; she heard the stir of the crowd, the gasp at the rising curtain. It had been so long since she had seen a Shakespeare play. And now to go, almost like a girl, with Risley, — it was everything to her, she acknowledged joyously. Not even sullen little Paula must spoil it.

And then Paula airily departed, having tossed aside the dance, for a visit out of town, — that was a relief, too. Mrs. Nelson’s mind had a really big clear space.

The day before their expedition — always a day of foreboding to those of few pleasures — Paula’s telegram came. She was returning home that night. But that, in the long run, did not matter; the Kitchells would look out for her in Mrs. Nelson’s absence.

Risley was good enough to meet Paula at the station. They walked home together in the crisp air. The confidence of her hand on his arm, the gayety of her, her triviality of chattering talk, her acceptance of him as friendly fact, — it all made for a patronizing geniality toward her.

“You’re awfully nice and strong,” she said as he helped her along over the icy places. “So you and the lady are going off junketing, and are going to leave poor little Paula all alone ?” she pouted plaintively. Risley admitted it smilingly.

“Indeed, Miss Paula” —

“Oh, I know. Mamma’s splendid, she has brains. I’m a terrible disappointment to her, I know. She thinks I don’t understand that I tire her and disappoint her and annoy her, — but I do. Poor mamma; she’s had an awfully mean time of it always; and then to have me thrust on her! She bears it like an angel; you both do. Even though you think me silly — and foolish, and stupid.”

Her face, in the chance glow of a street lamp, was tremendously pathetic and appealing. She was a tiny little sheep — out of the fold of culture.

Paula sighed.

Risley felt a glow of good-natured protection.

When they reached the Nelson gate Paula loosened her hold on Risley. Suddenly he heard her fall, and turning apprehensively found her lying there unconscious, deadly still. . . .

So when Paula came home it was in Risley’s arms.

Mrs. Nelson, meeting them at the door, saw him stalk by her — with a terrified word of explanation — and carry his burden bravely up the stairs to her bed.

The outcome of the accident had nothing of seriousness in it. As Risley and Mrs. Nelson sat before the fire late — Paula had gone to sleep like a pretty child — the older woman was conscious of a new restraint in him, a restraint he could not have confessed.

His eyes, at least, were utterly absent and turned, inadvertently, to the upper room; the gleam in them was not of mentality.

She spoke presently: “We must give up our excursion to-morrow.” The dignity of her motherhood put any regret out of her voice.

“Oh yes, — you are right. Poor little Paula, — she is all right, you think?” His variation of inflection was a study.

“You understand so. Oh yes, she is all right, — a little jarred, but quite all right,” she answered quietly.

To Risley Mrs. Nelson’s response was curiously apathetic and cold; he resented her. Her own thoughts were busy over the kindness of the man and the irritation that he must feel at having his plans go awry. She hid him in the cloud of her affection.

Her sense of the situation prevented her from saying the things that inevitably she had to feel, — things that had to do with her helpless disappointment, her little resentment, her regret for his disquietude. She could not but notice, however, that he suggested no future carrying out of their plans.

Presently she left him by the fire, where he sat afterward, alone. She wondered, in her own room, what his meditations were, and felt a strange, ill-at-ease consciousness of something gone wrong. If she had but guessed the truth!

Egbert Risley was alive with the wonderful memory of little Paula. Not the old little Paula, — but a new little Paula whom even now he held in his arms, tingling with the joy of it.

He had lifted her, out at the gate, at first with fear and misgiving; then as he felt her in his arms, deadly still, unconscious, her pretty hair loosened about her face, he held her close and strong, wonderingly, with awe. The warm touch of her skin sent his head reeling; the dark line of her lashes on the colorless perfection of her cheeks made him suddenly breathless. It seemed to him, on the instant, that she must never go out of his arms again, the old masculine primitive protection like a little flame in him; and then, she seemed too frail, too wonderfully, perfectly fashioned for the coarseness and meanness of his touch, he dared not hold her longer. For the first time in his twenty-seven burned-out years, Risley held a girl in his arms — and tumultuously knew it. He did not question the elemental fact.

And if, in the beautiful impulse of it, he had kissed little Paula’s closed eyes, that was a matter between himself and —

Before the fire, crumbling and charring into glowing ashen heaps, it was just Paula for him. Everything had fled from him but the glory of the burden he had borne up the stairs.

The room, in its placid silence, became but a haze, the world was a haze; he stared hypnotically into the point of light before him, entranced.

For hours and hours Risley sat before the fire, and always little Paula was in his arms.

The pale face of a new day — such a new day! — peered wanly in at the windows. Vaguely he guessed the truth that this day was to tell him, and Paula,— and Paula’s mother.