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One Woman's Life, a novel by Robert Herrick |
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Part Three. Aspirations - Chapter 3. On Board Ship |
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_ PART THREE. ASPIRATIONS CHAPTER III. ON BOARD SHIP At last Milly was tucked up in a steamer chair beside her artist husband, on board the old _Augusta Victoria_, bound for Europe, that exhaustless haven of romance where with or without an excuse all good Americans betake themselves when they can.... The last few weeks had been exciting ones. It had begun with Horatio's wedding to the homely bookkeeper, which Milly dutifully attended with her husband. In spite of the very handsome rug that they had sent the couple, Mrs. Horatio preserved a cold demeanor towards her husband's daughter, as if she still suspected the young woman of designs upon Horatio and had married him for the sole purpose of protecting him for the future from this rapacious creature. Milly, quickly perceiving the situation, mischievously redoubled her demonstration over poor Horatio, who was visibly torn between his loyalties. "Lord, what a sour face she has!" Milly commented to her husband, when they had left the bride and groom. "Poor old Dad, I hope she'll let him smoke!... Why do you suppose he married her?" "To have some one to work for," Bragdon, who was not without a sense of humor, suggested. "He might at least have found somebody better looking." "She looks capable, at any rate." Milly made a face. She did not like this appreciation of another woman's capability by her husband.... Then came the farewell visits of old friends, who all wished the two venturers great good luck and sadly prophesied they would never return to the city by the lake. Milly was tearful over their departure, but a delirious week in New York that followed did much to efface this sentimental grief. Jack kept finding old friends at every corner, who welcomed him "back to civilization" uproariously, and Milly felt fairly launched on her new career already. A very good-natured Big Brother-in-law took them to Sherry's for dinner, and, charmed by his new sister, spontaneously offered to increase their small hoard by another thousand, with the promise of still more help, in case their "stake" ran out before the two years of Europe they planned had brought results. Finally an old college acquaintance of Jack's, who had made his debut in literature successfully and was engaged to provide a woman's magazine with one of his tender stories with a pronounced "heart interest," promised to secure the illustrations for Bragdon. "If I can catch on," the artist told his wife, "it means--anything. Clive Reinhard turns out one of his sloppy stories every six months, and they are all illustrated." Altogether when they set sail they calculated their resources, if carefully managed, could be made to last three years. Three years of Europe!... Milly had never looked so far ahead in all her life. * * * * * Milly, snugly tucked up on the leeward side of the deck, closed her eyes as the boat rolled with heavy dignity, and thought. To be perfectly frank her married life in the four-room flat on the outskirts of Chicago had begun to pall on her. It seemed to lead nowhere. It had not been very different from the lives of the little people about her, from what she would have done and been if she had married Ted Donovan, say. Only, of course, Jack was different from Ted, and with him it could not last in the commonplace rut. They were merely little people, and very poor little people, in the big whirl of the western city--with their hope. Suddenly in the most romantic manner the Hope had taken shape--and Milly, thanks to grandma's surprising gift, arrogated to herself the whole credit of that. She did not pause to think what might have happened to them if they had been obliged to continue in the rut. She did not realize that already "love was not enough." But now heigho for Venture and the New Life--the life of Art! Milly still thought vaguely that according to Mrs. Lamereux it would mean meeting a lot of interesting people, endless clever talk over delightful meals in queer little French restaurants or in picturesque and fascinating studios. "Art" was the next thing to money or fashion. If one couldn't be awfully rich or a "social leader," the best thing was to be artistic and distinguished, which brought you into contact with all sorts of people, among them "the fashionables," of course. She meant that her husband should be a successful painter, not a mere illustrator. Of the real nature of Art and the artist's life Milly had no better conception than when she first fell in love with Jack Bragdon. She knew nothing of the artist's despairs and triumphs, his tireless labor to grasp the unseen, his rare and exalted joys, his strange valuation of life,--in short the blind, unconscious purpose of Art in the terrestrial scheme of things. Nor perhaps did John Bragdon at twenty-eight. The crust of _bourgeois_ standards is so thick in American life that it takes a rare and powerful nature to break through, and Bragdon had not yet begun to knock his way.... Milly's idea of Art, like most women's, was Decoration and Excitement. When successful, it made money and noise in the world, and brought social rewards, naturally. She hadn't married Jack for that, or for any reason except because of his own adorable personality, as she told him frequently. But now that she was married she meant to make the most of the Gift. Jack was to be a Creator, and she aspired to be embodied somehow in the creation and share its profits. At last they were launched: their marriage was really just beginning.... She snuggled closer to her husband under the common rug and murmured in his sleepy ear,-- "Isn't it great, Jack?" "What?" (Drowsily.) "Europe! Everything!... That we're really here on the steamer!" "Um!" "And you're going to be a great painter--" "Perhaps." (Dubiously.) "What shall you do first?" "Don't know--find a cab." "Silly!... Don't make fun of me.... Kiss me!... Do you mind, dear, going down into the cabin and looking for my hot-water bottle," etc. Bragdon recovered first from the Atlantic languor, and in the course of his rambles about the ship discovered an acquaintance in the second cabin,--a young instructor in architecture at a technical school, who with his wife and small child were also on their way to Paris for the winter. He brought Milly to see the Reddons where they were established behind a ventilator on the rear deck. Milly thought they seemed forlorn and pitied them. Mrs. Reddon was a little pale New Englander, apparently as fragile as a china cup, and in her arms was a mussy and peevish child. She confided to Milly that she expected another child, and Milly, whose one ever present terror was the fear of becoming inconveniently a mother, was quite horrified. "How can they do it!" she exclaimed to Jack, when they had returned to their more spacious quarters. "Go over second-class like that--it's so dirty and smelly and such common people all around one." "I suppose Reddon can't afford anything better." "Then I should stay at home until I could. With a baby, too, and another one coming: it's like the emigrants!" "Reddon is a clever chap: he's been over before, a couple of years at the Beaux Arts. I suppose he wants more work and didn't like to leave her behind." "She shouldn't have babies, then," Milly pronounced seriously, feeling her superiority in not thus handicapping her husband in his career. "It is tough," Bragdon admitted.... They saw a good deal of the Reddons during the voyage. They proved to be not in the least down-hearted over their lot, and quite unaware of Milly's commiseration. They were going to Paris for some desirable professional work, as they might go to San Francisco or Hong Kong, had the path pointed that way. They had babies because that was part of the game when one married, and they brought them along because there was nothing else to do with them. It was all very simple from the Reddon point of view. Milly considered Mrs. Reddon to be a "nice little thing," and they became chummy. Marion Reddon was a college-trained woman, with much more real culture than her husband or either of the Bragdons. She had read her Greek and Latin and forgotten them, liked pictures and music and books, but preferred babies when they came. Sam Reddon was a high-spirited American boy. He had never meant to study architecture and he hadn't intended to marry or to teach; but having done all these things he still found the world a merry place enough. He played the piano a little and sang Italian songs in an odd falsetto and roamed over the ship in disreputable corduroys, which he had preserved from his student days in Paris, making himself thoroughly at home in all three cabins. They talked Paris, of course, about which Reddon knew a great deal more than any of the others. "Where are you going to live? In the Quarter?" Mrs. Kemp had given Milly the address of an excellent pension near the Arc, at which Sam Reddon expressed a frank disgust. "Americans and English--the rotten _bourgeoisie_--why don't you stay in New York?" He figuratively spat upon the proprieties, and Milly was bewildered. "An _apartement meublee au cinquieme_, near the _Boul' 'Mich_ for us, eh, missus?" Milly had heard that the "Latin Quarter" was dirty, and not "nice." None of her Chicago friends ever stayed there. "You'll come and call on us, won't you?" the young man said with pleasant mockery. "Nobody will know, but we won't lay it up against you if you don't." Milly thought he was "fresh" and tried to snub him, but her manner only provoked Reddon the more. "What's your husband trying to paint for? There are two thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine other chaps like him in Paris, and he'll just be the three thousandth, who thinks he's going to make his fortune painting rich people's portraits. I'd rather break stone than try to live by paint." "And how about building summer villas for a living?" Bragdon queried. "Well," the young man replied with a grin. "You see I don't--I can't get any to do!" It was pleasant enough to joke about the arts, but Milly didn't expect to see much of the Reddons once they were launched in the fascinating life of Paris. She was becoming a little bored with them already, with their sloppy unconventionality and with ship life in general. Most of the first-cabin passengers, she discovered, were from Chilicothe, Ohio, or similar metropoli of the middle west, and as ignorant as she of what was before them. But when they sighted the green shores of Normandy, her enthusiasm revived at a bound. As they came into the harbor, the gray stone houses with high-pitched red roofs, the fishing smacks with their dun-colored sails, even the blue-coated men on the waiting tender had about them the charm of another world. They were different and strange, exciting to the thirsty soul of the American, so long sodden with the ugly monotony of a pioneer civilization. From the moment that the fat little tender touched the steamer, amid a babble of tongues, Milly was breathless with excitement. She squeezed her husband's arm, like an ecstatic child who had at last got what it wanted. "I'm _so_ happy," she chirped. "Isn't it all wonderful,--that we are really here, you and I?" He laughed in superior male fashion at her enthusiasm, and stroked his small mustache, but in his own way he was excited at sight of the promised land. "Hang on tight," he said to her, as they began the ticklish descent to the tender, "or it will be still more wonderful." Milly tripped over the long, unsteady gangway towards the Future, the great adventure of her life. There beyond, in the smiling green country with the old gray houses, lay mysterious satisfactions that she had hungered for all her life,--Experiences, Fame, and Fortune--in a word her Happiness. _ |
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