Love's Logic and Other Stories/The Gray Frock

THE GRAY FROCK

HE rights and wrongs of the matter are perhaps a little obscure, and it is possible to take his side as well as hers. Or perhaps there is really no question of sides at all—no need to condemn anybody; only another instance of the difficulty people have in understanding one another's point of view. But here, with a few lines added by way of introduction, are the facts as related in her obviously candid and sincere narrative.

Miss Winifred Petheram's father had an income from landed estates of about five thousand a year, and spent, say, six or thereabouts; his manor house was old and beautiful, the gardens delightful, the stables handsome and handsomely maintained, the housekeeping liberal, hospitable, almost lavish. Mr. Petheram had three sons and four daughters; but the sons were still young, and not the cause of any great expense. Mrs. Petheram was a quiet body, the two girls in the school-room were no serious matter; in fact, apart from the horses, Mildred and Winifred were, in a pecuniary point of view, the most serious burden on the family purse. For both were pretty girls, gay and fond of society, given to paying frequent visits in town and country, and in consequence needing many frocks and a considerable supply of downright hard cash. But everybody was very comfortable; only it was understood that at a period generally referred to as "some day" there would be very little for anybody except the eldest son. "Someday," meant, of course, when Mr. Petheram reluctantly died, and thereby brought his family into less favorable worldly circumstances.

From this brief summary of the family's position the duty of Mildred and Winifred (and, in due course of time, of the two girls in the schoolroom also) stands forth salient and unmistakable. Mildred performed it promptly at the age of nineteen years. He was the second son of a baronet, and his elder brother was sickly and unmarried; but, like a wise young man, he took no chances, went on the Stock Exchange, and became exceedingly well-to-do in an exceedingly brief space of time—something, in fact, "came off" in South Africa, and when that happens ordinary limits of time and probability are suspended. So with Mildred all was very well; and it was odds that one of the boys would be provided for by his brother-in-law. Winifred had just as good chances—nay, better; for her sensitive face and wondering eyes had an attraction that Mildred's self-possessed good looks could not exert. But Winifred shilly-shallied (it was her father's confidential after-dinner word) till she was twenty-one, then refused Sir Barton Amesbury (in itself a step of doubtful sanity, as was generally observed), and engaged herself to Harold Jackson, who made two hundred a year and had no prospects except the doubtful one of maintaining his income at that level—unless, that is, he turned out a genius, when it was even betting whether a mansion or the workhouse awaited him; for that depends on the variety of genius. Having taken this amazing course, Winifred was resolute and radiantly happy; her relatives, after the necessary amount of argument, shrugged their shoulders—the very inadequate ultima ratio to which a softening civilization seems to have reduced relatives in such cases.

"I can manage two hundred a year for her while I live," said Mr. Petheram, wiping his brow and then dusting his boots; he was just back from his ride. "After that"

"The insurance, my dear?" Mrs. Petheram suggested. But her husband shook his head; that little discrepancy above noted, between five and six thousand a year, had before this caused the insurance to be a very badly broken reed.

Harold Jackson—for in him the explanation of Winifred's action must be sought,—was tall, good-looking, ready of speech, and decidedly agreeable. There was no aggressiveness about him, and his quiet manners repelled any suspicion of bumptiousness. But it cannot be denied that to him Winifred's action did not seem extraordinary; he himself accounted for this by saying that she, like himself, was an Idealist, the boys by saying that he was "stuck-up," Mr. Petheram by a fretful exclamation that in all worldly matters he was as blind as a new-born puppy. Whatever the truth of these respective theories, he was as convinced that Winifred had chosen for her own happiness as that she had given him his. And in this she most fully agreed. Of course, then, all the shrugging of shoulders in the universe could not effect the radiant contentment of the lovers, nor could it avert the swift passage of months which soon brought the wedding-day in sight, and made preparations for it urgent and indispensable.

Married couples, even though they have only a precarious four hundred a year, must live somewhere—no idealism is independent of a roof; on the contrary, it centers round the home, so Harold said, and the word "home" seemed already sacred to Winifred as her glance answered his. It was the happiest day of her life when she put on her dainty new costume of delicate gray, took her parasol and gloves, matched to a shade with her gown, and mounted into the smart dog-cart which Jennie, the new chestnut mare, was to draw to the station. A letter had come from Harold to say that, after long search, he had found a house which would suit them, and was only just a trifle more expensive than the maximum sum they had decided to give for rent. Winifred knew that the delicate gray became her well, and that Harold would think her looking very pretty; and she was going to see her home and his. Her face was bright as she kissed her father and jumped down from the dog-cart; but he sighed when she had left him, and his brow was wrinkled as he drove Jennie back. He felt himself growing rather old; "some day" did not seem quite as remote as it used, and pretty Winnie—well, there was no use in crying over it now. Wilful girls must have their way; and it was not his fault that confounded agitators had played the deuce with the landed interest. The matter passed from his thoughts as he began to notice how satisfactorily Jennie moved.

Winifred's lover met her in London, and found her eyes still bright from the reveries of her journey. To-day was a gala day—they drove off in a hansom to a smart restaurant in Piccadilly, joking about their extravagance. Everything was perfect to Winifred, except (a small exception, surely!) that Harold failed to praise, seemed almost not to notice, the gray costume; it must have been that he looked at her face only!

"It's not a large house, you know," he said at lunch, smiling at her over a glass of Grave.

"Well, I sha'h't be wanting to get away from you," she answered, smiling. "Not very far, Harold!"

"Are your people still abusing me?"

He put the question with a laugh.

"They never abused you, only me." Then came the irrepressible question: "Do you like my new frock? I put it on on purpose—for the house, you know."

"Our home!" he murmured, rather sentimentally, it must be confessed. The question about the frock he did not answer; he was thinking of the home. Winifred was momentarily grateful to a stout lady at the next table, who put up her glass, looked at the frock, and with a nod of approval called her companion's attention to it. This was while Harold paid the bill.

Then they took another cab, and headed north—through Berkeley Square, where Winifred would have liked, but did not expect, to stop, and so up to Oxford Street. Here they bore considerably to the east, then plunged north again and drove through one or two long streets. Harold, who had made the journey before, paid no heed to the route, but talked freely of delightful hours which they were to enjoy together, of books to read and thoughts to think, and of an intimate sympathy which, near as they were already to one another, the home and the home life alone could enable them fully to realize. Winifred listened; but far down in her mind now was another question, hardly easier to stifle than that about the frock. "Where are we going to?" would have been its naked form; but she yielded no more to her impulse than to look about her and mark and wonder. At last they turned by a sharp twist from a long narrow street into a short narrower street, where a wagon by the curbstone forced the cab to a walk, and shrill boys were playing an unintelligible noisy game.

"What queer places we pass through!" she cried with a laugh, as she laid her hand on his arm and turned her face to his.

"Pass through! We're at home," he answered, returning her laugh. "At home, Winnie!" He pointed at a house on the right-hand side, and, immediately after, the cab stopped. Winifred got out, holding her skirt back from contact with the wheel. Harold, in his eagerness to ring the door-bell, had forgotten to render her this service. She stood on the pavement for a moment looking about her. One of the boys cried: "Crikey, there's a swell!" and she liked the boy for it. Then she turned to the house.

"It wants a lick of paint," said Harold cheerfully, as he rang the bell again.

"It certainly does," she admitted, looking up at the dirty walls.

An old woman opened the door; she might be said, by way of metaphor, to need the same process as the walls; a very narrow passage was disclosed behind her.

"Welcome!" said Harold, giving Winifred his hand and then presenting her to the old woman. "This is my future wife," he explained. "We've come to look at the house. But we won't bother you, Mrs. Blidgett, we'd rather run over it by ourselves. We shall enjoy that, sha'n't we, Winnie?"

Winnie's answer was a little scream and a hasty clutch at her gown; a pail of dirty water, standing in the passage, had threatened ruin; she recoiled violently from this peril against the opposite wall and drew away again, silently exhibiting a long trail of dark dust on her new gray frock. Harold laughed as he led the way into a small square room that opened from the passage.

"That's the parlor," said the old woman, wiping her arms with her apron. "You can find your way up-stairs; nothing's locked." And with this remark she withdrew by a steep staircase leading underground.

"She's the caretaker," Harold explained.

"She doesn't seem to have taken much care," observed Winifred, still indignant about her gown and holding it round her as closely as drapery clings to an antique statue.

Miss Petheram's account of the house, its actual dimensions, accommodation, and characteristics, has always been very vague, and since she refused information as to its number in the street, verification of these details has remained impossible. Perhaps it was a reasonably capacious, although doubtless not extensive, dwelling; perhaps, again, it was a confined and well-nigh stifling den. She remembered two things—first, its all-pervading dirt; secondly, the remarkable quality which (as she alleged) distinguished its atmosphere. She thought there were seven "inclosures," this term being arrived at (after discussion) as a compromise between "rooms" and "pens"; and she knew that the windows of each of these inclosures were commanded by the windows of several other apparently similar and very neighboring inclosures. Beyond this she could give no account of her first half-hour in the house; her exact recollection began when she was left alone in the inclosure on the first floor, which Harold asserted to be the drawing-room, Harold himself having gone down-stairs to seek the old woman and elicit from her some information as to what were and what were not tenant's fixtures in the said inclosure. "You can look about you," he remarked cheerfully, as he left her, "and make up your mind where you're going to have your favorite seat. Then you shall tell me, and I shall have the picture of you sitting there in my mind." He pointed to a wooden chair, the only one then in the room. "Experiment with that chair," he added, laughing. "I won't be long, darling."

Mechanically, without considering things which she obviously ought to have considered, Winifred sank into the designated seat, laid her parasol on a small table, and leaned her elbows on the same piece of furniture as she held her face between her gloved hands. The atmosphere again asserted its peculiar quality; she rose for a moment and opened the window; fresh air was gained at the expense of spoilt gloves, and was weighted with the drawbacks of a baby's cries and an inquisitive woman's stare from over the way. Shutting the window again, she returned to her chair—the symbol of what was to be her favorite seat in days to come, her chosen corner in the house which had been the subject of so many talks and so many dreams. There were a great many flies in the room; the noise of adjacent humanity in street and houses was miscellaneous and penetrating; the air was very close. And this house was rather more expensive than their calculations had allowed. They had immensely enjoyed making those calculations down there in the country, under the old yew hedge and in sight of the flower-beds beneath the library window. She remembered the day they did it. There was a cricket match in the meadow. Mildred and her husband brought the drag over, and Sir Barton came in his tandem. It was almost too hot in the sun, but simply delightful in the shade. She and Harold had had great fun over mapping out their four hundred a year and proving how much might be done with it—at least compared with anything they could want when once they had the great thing that they wanted.

The vision vanished; she was back in the dirty little room again; she caught up her parasol; a streak across the dust marked where it had lain on the table; she sprang up and twisted her frock round, craning her neck back; ah, that she had reconnoitered that chair! She looked at her gloves; then with a cry of horror she dived for her handkerchief, put it to her lips, and scrubbed her cheeks; the handkerchief came away soiled, dingy, almost black. This last outrage overcame her; the parasol dropped on the floor, she rested her arms on the table and laid her face on them, and she burst into sobs, just as she used to in childhood when her brothers crumpled a clean frock or somebody spoke to her roughly. And between her sobs she cried, almost loudly, very bitterly: "Oh, it's too mean and dirty and horrid!"

Harold had stolen softly up-stairs, meaning to surprise the girl he loved, perhaps to let a snatched kiss be her first knowledge of his return. He flushed red, and his lips set sternly; he walked across the room to her with a heavy tread. She looked up, saw him, and knew that her exclamation had been overheard.

"What in the world is the matter?" he asked in a tone of cold surprise.

It was very absurd—she couldn't stop crying; and from amid her weeping nothing more reasonable, nothing more adequate, nothing less trivial would come than confused murmurs of "My frock, Harold!" "My parasol!" "Oh, my face, my gloves!" He smiled contemptuously. "Don't you see?" she exclaimed, exhibiting the gloves and parasol.

"See what? Are you crying because the room's dirty?" He paused and then added, "I'm sorry you think it mean and horrid. Very sorry, Winifred."

Offense was deep and bitter in his voice; he looked at her with a sort of disgust; she stopped sobbing and regarded him with a gaze in which fright and expectation seemed mingled, as though there were a great peril, and just one thing that might narrowly avert it. But his eyes were very hard. She dried her tears, and then forlornly scrubbed her cheeks again. He watched her with hostile curiosity, appearing to think her a very strange spectacle. Presently he spoke. "I thought you loved me. Oh, I daresay you thought so too till I came into competition with your new frock. I beg pardon—I must add your gloves and your parasol. As for the house, it's no doubt mean and horrid; we were going to be poor, you see." He laughed scornfully, as he added, "You might even have had to do a little dusting yourself now and then! Horrible!"

"I just sat there and looked at him." That was Winifred's own account of her behavior. It is not very explicit and leaves room for much conjecture as to what her look said or tried to say. But whatever the message was he did not read it. He was engrossed in his own indignation, readier to hurt than to understand, full of his own wrong, of the mistake he had made, of her extraordinary want of love, of courage, of the high soul. Very likely all this was a natural enough state of mind for him to be in. Justice admits his provocation; the triviality of her spoken excuses gave his anger only too fine an opportunity. He easily persuaded himself that here was a revelation of the real woman, a flash of light that showed her true nature, showing, too, the folly of his delusion about her. Against all this her look and what it asked for had very little chance, and she could find no words that did not aggravate her offense.

"This is really rather a ludicrous scene," he went on. "Is there any use in prolonging it?" He waited for her to speak, but she was still tongue-tied. "The caretaker needn't be distressed by seeing the awful effects of her omission to dust the room; but, if you're composed enough, we might as well go." He looked round the room. "You'll be glad to be out of this," he ended.

"I know what you must think of me," she burst out, "but—but you don't understand—you don't see"

"No doubt I'm stupid, but I confess I don't. At least there's only one thing I see." He bowed and waved his hand toward the door. "Shall we go?" he asked.

She led the way down-stairs, her skirt again held close and raised clear of her ankles; her care for it was not lost on Harold as he followed her, for she heard him laugh again with an obtrusive bitterness that made his mirth a taunt. The old caretaker waited for them in the passage.

"When'll you be coming, sir?" she asked.

"I don't know. It's not certain we shall come," said he. "The lady is not much taken with the house."

"Ah, well!" sighed the old woman resignedly.

For an account of their drive back to the station materials are, again, sadly wanting. "He hardly said a word, and I did nothing but try to get my face clean and my gloves presentable," was Winifred's history of their journey. But she remembered—or chose to relate—a little more of what passed while they waited for the train on the platform at Euston. He left her for a few minutes on pretext of smoking a cigarette, and she saw him walking up and down, apparently in thought. Then he came back and sat down beside her. His manner was grave now; to judge by his recorded words, perhaps it was even a little pompous; but when may young men be pompous, if not at such crises as these?

"It's no use pretending that nothing has happened, Winifred," he said. "That would be the hollowest pretense, not worthy, I think, of either of us. Perhaps we had better take time to consider our course and—er—our relations to one another."

"You don't want to marry me now?" she asked simply.

"I want to do what is best for our happiness," he replied. "We cannot forget what has happened to-day."

"I know you would never forget it," she said.

He did not contradict her; he looked first at his watch, then along the platform for the approach of her train. To admit that he might forget it was impossible to him; in such a case forgetfulness would be a negation of his principles and a slur on his perception. It would also be such a triumph over his vanity and his pride as it did not lie in him to achieve, such a forgiveness as his faults and virtues combined to put beyond the power of his nature. She looked at him; and "I smiled," she said, not seeming herself to know why she had smiled, but conscious that, in the midst of her woe, some subtly amusing thought about him had come into her mind. She had never been amused at him before; so she, too, was getting some glimmer of a revelation out of the day's experience—not the awful blaze of light that had flashed on Harold's eyes, but a dim ray, just enough to give cause to that puzzled smile for which she could not explicitly account.

So they parted, and for persons who have followed the affair at all closely it is hardly necessary to add that they never came together again. This issue was obvious, and Winifred seems to have made up her mind to it that very same evening, for she called her mother into her room (as the good lady passed on the way to bed) and looked up from the task of brushing the gray frock which she had spread out on the sofa.

"I don't think I shall marry Mr. Jackson now, mother," she said.

Mrs. Petheram looked at her daughter and at her daughter's gown.

"You'd better tell me more about it to-morrow. You look tired to-night, dear," she replied.

But Winifred never told her any more—in the first place, because the family was too delighted with the fact to care one straw about how it had come to pass, and, in the second place, on the more important ground that the thing was really too small, too trivial, and too absurd to bear telling—at least to the family. To me, for some reason or other, Winifred did tell it, or some of it—enough, anyhow, to enable me, with the help of a few touches of imagination, to conjecture how it occurred.

"Don't you think it was very absurd?" she asked at the end of her story. We were sitting by the yew hedge, near the library windows, looking across the flower-beds to the meadow; it was a beautiful day, and the old place was charming. "Because," she added, "I did love him, you know; and it seems a small thing to separate about, doesn't it?"

"If he had behaved differently—" I began.

"I don't see how he could be expected to," she murmured.

"You expected him to," I said firmly. She turned to me with an appearance of interest, as though I might be able to interpret to her something that had been causing her puzzle. "Or you wouldn't have looked at him as you say you did—or smiled at him, as you admit you did. But you were wrong to expect him to, because he's not that kind of man."

"What kind of man?"

"The kind of man to catch you in his arms, smother you in kisses (allow me the old phrase), tell you that he understood all you felt, knew all you were giving up, realized the great thing you were doing for him."

Winifred was listening. I went on with my imaginary scene of romantic fervor.

"That when he contrasted that mean little place with the beauties you were accustomed to, with the beauties which were right and proper for you, when he saw your daintiness soiled by that dust, that gown whose hem he would willingly"

"He needn't say quite as much as that," interrupted Winifred, smiling a little.

"Well, or words to that effect," said I. "That when he did all this and saw all this, you know, he loved you more, and knew that you loved him more than he had dared to dream, with a deeper love, a love that gave up for him all that you loved next best and second only to him; that after seeing your tears he would never doubt again that you would face all trials and all troubles with him at your side—don't you think if he'd said something of that kind, accompanying his words with the appropriate actions—" I paused.

"Well?" asked Winifred.

"Don't you think you might have been living in that horrid little house now, instead of being about to contract an alliance with Sir Barton Amesbury?"

"How do you know I shall do that?" she cried.

"It needs," I observed modestly, "little skill to discern the approach of the inevitable." I looked at her thoughtful face and at her eyes; they had their old look of wondering in them. "Don't you think that if he'd treated the situation in that way—?" I asked.

"Perhaps," she said softly. "But he wouldn't think of all that. He was such an Idealist."

I really do not know why she applied that term to him at that moment, except that he used to apply it to himself at many moments. But since it seemed to her to explain his conduct, there is no need to quarrel with the epithet.

"And I hope," said I, "that the gray frock wasn't irretrievably ruined?"

"I've never worn it again," she murmured.

So I suppose it was ruined—unless she has some other reason. But she would be right to treat it differently from other frocks; it must mean a good deal to her, although it failed to mean anything except its own pretty self to Mr. Jackson.