Phoebe Makes the Grand Tour

RS. MARTIN sat alone in the sewing-room, hemming busily on the new napkins. She had sent Phoebe on an errand to Mrs. Warburton, hoping that that energetic lady might pull her daughter out of the doldrums. For only the evening before Phoebe, coming into her mother's room for a good-night talk, had delivered herself of the following:

“Mother, do you know that I wish I could go away from Maywood for a while. You don't know how sick I am of every single thing about it. I know it by heart. I can shut my eyes and see every street and every house just as plain as if was all painted on the inside of my eyelids. And I'm so tired of Maywood people. And I hate to go to the Library—I've read all the fiction there and you have to wait such a long time when you recommend books. The Woman's club is pokey, and I never did care for bridge, and all the girls I like best are away or busy or engaged. Anything I used to like I don't care for any longer, and the things I'd like to do I can't do. What do you suppose is the matter, mother?”

“Oh, it's just the beginning of the spring feeling,” Mrs. Martin said with her usual moderation. “Just as soon as the weather settles you'll get over it.”

“Well, I hope so. I shall be glad enough when the warm weather comes. I'm so tired of snow-freeze-thaw-rain-snow-freeze-thaw-rain that I don't know what to do. I've made up my mind that I just hate winter.”

A little mollified, Phoebe kissed her mother good-night. But she trailed a discontented grumble to the very door of her room.

It was of this that Mrs. Martin was thinking. And so intense was her preoccupation that she was only vaguely conscious that her daughter, returning prematurely from the Warburtons, had dropped into the big wing-chair. Mrs. Martin sewed tranquilly on for an instant. Then something psychological seemed to jump out of the air at her. Her consciousness, flashing back over the last moment, re-registered three astounding facts. Phoebe had actually not banged the front door: she had closed it gently. Phoebe had not run up the stairs, occasionally taking two at a time: she had ascended them slowly, step on step. Phoebe had not rushed into the room, whirlwind fashion, bubbling with gossip: she had drifted silently through the doorway and across the floor.

With a start, Mrs. Martin looked up.

Crumpled up in her chair, Phoebe was staring straight at her. Above her white collar, her face showed whiter. Her eyebrows were caught in the tangle of mental panic. Her lower lip dropped. All this would have been terrifying if it had not been for her eyes. And her eyes Mrs. Martin was not given to hyperbole, but it occurred to her that, for the first time in her life, she had seen a pair of stars in the human countenance.

“What is it, Phoebe?” she asked anxiously.

Phoebe swallowed something before her lips would move. And when she spoke, her words came on breath, not sound. “What do you think has happened, mother? I'm dreaming, of course. But I've pinched myself and pinched myself and I don't wake up. Mother, Mrs. Warburton has invited me to go abroad with her for six months as her guest.”

Mrs. Martin stared back. Her own eyebrows caught in the tangle of mental panic, and for an instant the two looked strangely alike. That terror of change which Mrs. Martin had always fought in herself seemed now to clutch at her very heart. An instant, she did not see Phoebe's face. For with the inner vision of mothers, lightning-swift and intuitional, she saw Opportunity outside, knocking at the door of her daughter's life. She knew that she alone could open that door. She knew that she must open it. For if denied, fickle Opportunity might never come again. If welcomed, she would take the child by the hand and lead her But what a dreary silent arc of life it left to be lived through somehow—Phoebeless.

“I guess you'd better go, Phoebe,” she said slowly. “There's no reason in the world why you shouldn't. But of course I must talk it over with your father first,” she added, with her characteristic caution.

“Go! Why, Mother Martin, how can you say that! Leave you for six whole months! And father! Why, I couldn't—I simply couldn't. And then there's Ern. Do you know, mother, I've been thinking a lot about Ern, coming home from the Warburtons, and I've made up my mind that he's as good a brother as any girl I know has. Oh, it's just impossible, that's all there is to it. Then think of the dressmaking! And I ought to do loads and oodles and slathers and rafts of studying—I'm so ignorant. Mother, can you believe it's true? I'm still pinching myself. All my life, I've been crazy to go to Europe. And now I'm going. But to think of me getting this chance when you and father haven't been. I feel so selfish. It doesn't make so much difference about Ern. A man can always go anywhere he wants to. And besides Ern wouldn't give up August at Camp Hello for a trip to the moon. But I didn't say yes. And I didn't say no. I said I'd think it over. It's a very serious question, Mother Martin. Think of London and Paris and Rome and Venice and Florence and Naples!”

All Phoebe's vitality and vivacity came back with a rush. She pirouetted madly about the room until her cheeks flashed roses again. “Oh, mother!” Phoebe stopped almost in midair. “Supposing one of you should die while I'm gone. What would I do? Well, I'd just kill myself—that's all.”

“Don't talk nonsense, Phoebe,” Mrs. Martin said with composure. “If we stopped to think of things like that, we'd never go anywhere or do anything. When would Mrs. Warburton want to start? Is Tug going?”

“In a month. No, Tug can't leave Harvard. He'll go West in the summer with Mr. Warburton. He had his choice between the two trips and it was he suggested that his mother take me. Oh, Mrs. Warburton told me to tell you that she never made up her mind that she'd go until yesterday and she was going to speak to you first, but when I came over with that new stencil-pattern which made her think so much of the cathedral at Milan, she just couldn't hold in any longer. She's asked me and Ern to come over to dinner so's we can talk over the itinerary together.”

“Edward,” Mrs. Martin said to Mr. Martin that night, waiting pent-up until their solitary dinner was well under way, “Mrs. Warburton has invited Phoebe to go to Europe with her for six months.”

“To Europe! Six months! Well, that is generous of her—the Warburtons have been good neighbors, Bertha. Six months! Good Lord, Bertha, what will the house be without Phoebe?”

“We can't expect to keep her with us always. We might as well get used to that. Phoebe's the kind that marries young.”

“Marriage! That's a foolish noise, mother! It will be time enough to think of marriage ten years from now.” Mr. Martin poked the fire with undue vigor. Seated again, he studied his work with undue preoccupation. Once or twice, he moved restlessly as if he were about to speak. But in the end he forced his own words back.

Mrs. Martin eyed him furtively now and again. “It's a great responsibility, isn't it, Edward,” she said once, “trying to decide how much you oughtn't to keep them with you and yet not being selfish about them?”

“Them,” between Mr. and Mrs. Martin always meant Phoebe and Ernest.

Mr. Martin replied only by an exclamation, half sigh of regret, half groan of impatience. “When do they want to start?”

“In a month.”

“All right. Six months!” Involuntarily, Mr. Martin's eye went to the calendar. “That would bring her home in August. Buy her anything you think she needs, mother.” Mr. Martin did not speak again, but it was a long time before he took up his magazine.

“What do you think of it, father?” Phoebe called the moment she opened the door that night. She rushed up the stairs, talking all the way, and plumped into Mr. Martin's lap.

“I think it's great,” Mr. Martin replied. “People didn't get chances like that when your mother and I were your age. You see that you make the most of it, young woman!”

If what Phoebe accomplished during her month of preparation could be used as a unit of her capacity to make “the most of it,” stout, fatuous, easy-going Mrs. Warburton might well gasp with dismay. Borrowing library-cards in the neighborhood to the number of eight, Phoebe, tri-weekly, lugged home a bag of books. Travel, poetry, essays, history, and historic-fiction, she skimmed them all.

Evenings that were not given over to farewell hospitality were spent with her father, discussing the trip. Phoebe routed out all the geographies and atlases that the house contained, even a faded old globe from the playroom closet. Mr. Martin bought her a big map of Europe, which they hung on the living-room wall. Every day Mrs. Warburton evolved a fresh itinerary. Every night Phoebe and her father blazed its red-ink course on the new map. The living-room table looked as if a geographers' society were in session. Mrs. Martin, tranquilly bringing order out of all this uncertainty and confusion, caught up with things by means of Phoebe's staccato monologues.

“Father, you don't know how confusing it is, the different way people talk about Europe to you. Mrs. Ellis told me to be sure not to take any light clothes but to have plenty of flannels, furs, and hot-water bottles. Well, she said they ought to train Arctic explorers by making them spend their winters in 'sunny Italy.' She said the Polar cold would never have any terrors for them after that. Then, right on top of that, Mrs. Doane said to be sure to take plenty of pretty, light dresses—she didn't, and two or three times she was up against it. Maud Pierce told me that I'd love Paris and hate London and Professor Rollins said that Paris was disappointing but London perfectly lovely—at least he didn't say 'perfectly lovely'—he said 'atmospherically stimulating'—you know what a fierce high-brow he is, father. And everybody who doesn't say I'll be awfully disappointed in Venice because the canals are full of dead cats and dogs (isn't that the limit?) says that I can't have any idea from the pictures how gorgeous it is. Pretty nearly everybody advises me to wait and go late after I've studied more Italian and French. But others say I won't need the languages at all—they speak English everywhere. Old Mrs. Massey said that going by the southern route and seeing Italy first will just ruin France and England for me. And Mr. Yeaton said that I'd appreciate England a lot more coming on it that way—he says when you actually hear some English spoken after so many months, you just about pass away. Some say that they had the most awful times with the customs and the rest that they never had one bit of trouble. Some people tell me never under any circumstances to let myself go about unchaperoned, and others tell me that an American girl can go alone all over Europe. That friend of Mrs. Ellis's gave me a long list of things you could get cheaper in Europe and, after she was gone, Mrs. Ellis said you could get every one of them for half the price in the Boston department stores. Mrs. Haywood said I ought to be ashamed for not seeing my own wonderful country first, though I don't know what that's got to do with it. I've just about made up my mind, father, that I am not going to pay any attention whatever to what people say to me.”

But the time came when, trunk packed for the last time, Phoebe stood on the wharf—a trim little navy-blue figure—beyond the reach of criticism or suggestion. One arm was slipped through her father's, the other was clasped tight about her mother's waist.

“There's only one thing I want you to promise me,” she said, the tears streaming down her cheeks, “And that is—when I come home, no matter what time I get in, day or night, you'll come into Boston to meet me.”

“Of course, child,” Mrs. Martin said, her own eyes swimming, and “Sure, Phoebe!” Mr. Martin said, with a palpable assumption of cheer.

“What a beautiful time the child is having!” Mrs. Martin said.

“Yes, it will be a great experience for her. I'm glad we let her go,” Mr. Martin said.

“Cramp! If that isn't like a girl. I never had a cramp in my life,” Ernest said.

“I don't know that I'd like a city to be too dirty,” Mrs. Martin said.

“I must take Phoebe for a little walk on the dump when she comes back if she finds herself getting discontented,” Mr. Martin said.

“Why didn't she say what the crater of Vesuvius looked like?” Ernest said.

“What a fine man that Mr. Anderson must be,” Mrs. Martin said.

“Yes, but I don't know that I care so much for Waring.” Mr. Martin said.

“Gee, Phoebe'd make a healthy nun,” Ernest said.

“How carried away the child is!” Mrs. Martin said.

“I'm afraid we're in for another line of interior decoration when Phoebe gets home,” Mr. Martin said.

“Wouldn't I like to hand that Waring a bunch of fives!” Ernest said.

“Now I don't want that child to spend any more money on me,” Mrs. Martin said.

“I'm afraid she'll have to make up her mind to put up with the vulgar commercialism of the United States, though,” Mr. Martin said.

“You bet I wouldn't get so stuck on any dago-town that I wanted to live there. You can't tell me any country's as good as the United States,” Ernest said.

“I'd admire to see Paris,” Mrs. Martin said.

“Phoebe seems to be getting over her passion for dirt,” Mr. Martin said.

“I bet they're cuff-links or shirt-studs,” Ernest said.

“Father,” Mrs. Martin said two nights after the receipt of this letter, you remember you told Phoebe that you would go into Boston to meet her, no matter what time she arrived.”

“I remember,” Mr. Martin said. “We'll all three go on to New York Wednesday so as to be there when the boat gets in.”