Gertrude Hall Brownell

“ Not Aurora alone looked forth from the canvas,–throat of lily, cheek of rose, heaven-blue eyes, smile and ringlets of immitigable sunniness. Gerald, self-depicted in every subtle brush-stroke, looked, too.
“It takes sober, solid, careful people to be interesting when they commit a rashness,” thought Leslie. Then, with a little surge of envy in her well-regulated breast, “To be swept off one’s feet,” she thought, “how educative it must be, how enlarging.” ”

“ He studied the portrait of his mother, one of his earliest, bad in a way, but excellent in the matter of likeness. His mother no more than Amabel had been a pathetic person, Mrs. Foss would certainly have said. To which Gerald might have answered that she was not so during an afternoon call; but that the most characteristic thing about that gentle and delicate woman had been the fact of her living so much in the life of others and being open to endless sorrows through them. The dim affectionate eyes, the deprecating half-smile of his mother, engaged sympathy for the unfair plight. ”

“ But, if you must insist on that sort of symmetry, Brenda is not tall. He is a kind of Italian, more common than one thinks, that doesn’t get into literature, having nothing exciting, mysterious, wicked, or even conspicuously picturesque about him. After being a good son,–they are very often good sons,–he will be a good husband and a good father, like his own father before him. He is without vanity, while looking like a square-built, stocky, responsible Romeo. Devoted to duty, passionate for order, absolutely punctilious in matters of honor and courtesy, he is a good citizen, a good soldier. ”

“ We aren’t impostors, Hat. We’re just having fun, and don’t want our real names to queer it. If they should slip out when we aren’t thinking, they’d simply sound like nicknames we’ve got for each other. But they won’t slip out. I’m too fond of calling you Estelle. Don’t you love to call me Aurora? Hat, how did I behave, far as you could see?”
“Nell, if I hadn’t known you, and had just been seeing you for the first time, I should have said to myself: ‘What a fine, good-looking, beautifully dressed, refined, and ladylike woman that is! ”

“ At the wedding reception something of this quality of emotion continued still to possess the invited guests as long as Brenda and Manlio, beneath their arch of flowers, stood smiling response to congratulations and compliments.
It was in the general experience not unlike that part of the opera where, to a matchless music, the god of flame and the glowing hearth lauds the loveliness of woman and the strength of man’s pursuit; and the other gods, uplifted, look at one another with washed eyes, feeling anew how wonderful they all are, how wonderful it all is. ”

“ You haven’t got a bit of fun in you.”
“Yes, I have!” said Gerald, and with a creeping smile–grudging at first, then brighter–looked Mrs. Hawthorne in the eye, while such fun as lived in him traveled over the bridge of their glances, and she was permitted to get a glimpse of his underlying relish.
“All I ask of you, Mrs. Hawthorne,” he said, finally, “is that you will not let your innocence on these subjects appear when you are with others. I don’t say pretend. Just keep still, be silent! It does not matter when you are with me. When you are with me I beg of you to be yourself. ”

“ Hawthorne,” cried Gerald, “do me the very real favor, will you, like a dear good woman, of not calling the most venerable of the primitives Simma Bewey!”
It was astonishing what things Gerald Fane could say without losing his effect of a complete, even considerate politeness.
“But that’s the way it’s written,” said Mrs. Hawthorne.
“You will pardon the liberty I take of contradicting you; it is not. It gives me goose-flesh. Cimabue!”
“Very well. I’ll try to remember. But it doesn’t matter what I call him; his Madonna is no beauty. ”

“ Gerald’s face struggled into a sourish smile, and he bowed ironical thanks for the compliment. Lifting his head, he shot a glance of reproachful interrogation at the consul. Was his friend doing this humorously, to tease him, or was the man simply not thinking?
The consul looked innocent of any sly intention; he was all of a jocund smile; the consul, who should have known better, wore the air of doing him a pleasure and her a pleasure and a pleasure to himself; the air of thinking that any normally constituted young man would be grateful for such a chance. ”

“ Sensitively timid, yet bold in his half dozen inches with curiosity of life and the exuberant gladness of youth, Busteretto could frisk and he could tremble. He was cowed by the sight of fearful things, beetles and big dogs, but next moment, with budding valor, would dash to investigate them. He twinkled when he ran, his bark lifted him off his four feet. Withal something exquisite marked him even among Maltese puppies, which Aurora felt without art to define it. She said he reminded her of the new moon when it is no bigger than a fingernail. ”

“ The music was describing a hero’s death-bed, besieged by dreams of battle, at moments so noisy that Gerald had to open his eyes again for a look of curiosity at the person who could produce so much sound. As he watched him and his nose, like the magnified beak of a hen,–the nose of a man who loves to talk,–he tried a little to imagine those merry evenings spoken of by Aurora. ”

“ If one must go to church in such a case, it was Gerald’s opinion, one does not go to bed at all. But she belonged to the class of people who would miss the last act of an opera rather than miss a train or allow the beans to burn. A bread-and-butter person, a sluggish, fat-brained person, elementary, not awakened and sharpened to appreciation and wonder. If he had not been in such a good humor he might have been cross, scornful of her; as it was, he indulgently thought her merely too flatly healthy in every taste for anything but the wilds of Cape Cod to which she sometimes playfully referred. ”

“ I know what I’m like,–no disparagement meant, Mrs. Hawthorne,–and what you’re like, and I won’t let myself forget. I’m looking out first of all for myself, but I’m looking out for you, too, dear boy. Don’t say any more about it to-night, Gerald, please, with the stars shining like that, and the air so sweet that all the fairy-tales you ever heard seem possible. I want to keep solid earth under my feet.”
Gerald was not so devoid of the right masculine spark as not to recognize the moment for one of which advantage should be taken by any creature capable of growing a mustache. ”

“ Aurora in a kind of awe wondered what elevated things those pale rose lips of the bride would say to the bridegroom when, the turmoil of festivity ended, they were in nuptial solitude. Impossible to imagine! It must be something altogether beyond other brides; and his words must make those of all other lovers sound common and poor.
When the arch of flowers was empty and the happy pair had left for the train, Lily and Gerald went strolling about the garden hand in hand. ”

“ Every fiber composing Aurora twittered with a distinct and separate glee while she hurried through her toilet, a little breathless, a little distracted, and mortally afraid Estelle would hear and come to ask questions. From her wardrobe she drew the things best suited to the day and her humor: a white India silk all softly spotted with appleblossoms, of which she had said when she considered acquiring it that it was too light-minded for her age and size, but yet, vaulting over those objections, had bought and had made up according to its own merits and not hers ”

“ Something malevolent pertained to the personalities, something disquieting to the actions; suffering and oppression resulted from his inability to get away from them. They came and went, one scene melted into another, sometimes beautiful, sometimes repulsive, a sickly disagreeableness being common to all, and the fatigue involved with watching the spectacle of them weighing like a physical burden.
But yet beneath the unrest of fever dreams there was in Gerald, after Aurora’s visit, as if a substratum of quiet and content. ”

“ Mr. Foss was seen approaching, and Mrs. Hawthorne smiled and sparkled in anticipation of the jokes they would exchange on her fairy weight and his youthful limberness.
Gerald sent his eyes around the room to see if any one were free whom it would be a sort of duty to ask to dance. He did not look for pleasure from dancing, the less so that Charlie Hunt, on the perpetual jump, and dancing with a perfection almost unmanly, had brought the exercise into temporary discredit with him. Miss Madison was dancing, Miss Seymour was dancing, Leslie was dancing, Brenda–his eyes were unable to find. ”

“ That slavery! that unrest! and fever! and jealousy! No, not again. I have served my sentence. Too many times I have waked in the black of night and waited for daylight, wishing I had been dust for a hundred years. I know now that in order to have a little peace a person must not want anything. That is the price. We mustn’t want anything, Aurora. We mustn’t want anything, we mustn’t mind anything, we mustn’t care about anything, we must submit to everything!” This counsel of perfection came from Gerald almost in a sob. ”

“ Gerald would in reality have preferred to stay away, almost as much as Estelle and possibly Doctor Tom would have preferred him to do so. But just there the incalculable, the ungovernable, in human nature came into play. A golden thread, a mere hair, strong as a steel cable, drew him to the place where he could expect to find no comfort, and had no object to accomplish except just to be there, with his eyebrows one higher than the other. ”

“ Then came Lew Dockstader.
Now, report had spread that Mrs. Hawthorne was to appear as a negress; no one was prepared to see her appear as a negro. The surprise, when it dawned on this one and the other that that stove-black face with rolling eyes and big red and white smile, that burly body incased in old, bagging trousers, those shuffling feet shod in boots a mile too large for them and curling up at the toe, belonged to Mrs. Hawthorne, the surprise was in itself a success. Then, as has been said, Aurora was undeniably in the vein that evening. ”

“ Gerald could have laughed. But he did not; nor made any remark. He did not dislike seeing those voracious maws stuffed with a fat morsel. He knew as much of the real poverty in Florence as of the innocent impudence of many poor, with their lingering medieval outlook upon the relations of the poor and the rich. He sided with those against these. Singularly, perhaps, he regarded himself as belonging among the latter, the rich. He was glad the chorus-singers and the sposina and the worried padre di famiglia were going to be made glad by rich crumbs from Aurora’s board. ”

“ Hawthorne not to let the incident pass. He had ceased to be furious at Antonia; he had not written in cold blood the wrathful, finishing letter planned in heat of brain. That, after all, was Antonia as he had always known her and been her friend: Antonia, capable of heroisms and generosities, fineness and insight, density and petulance. One could not drop the great woman into the waste-basket because on one occasion more she had been perverse and the sufferer happened to be oneself. But the great woman, thought Gerald, needed a sober word spoken to her. ”

“ I shall go on growing more eccentric and solitary, and call myself lucky quite beyond my merits if those particular snares which the devil Melancholy sets for the solitary may be escaped, that I may neither drink, nor drug myself, nor shoot myself, nor marry the cook!”
“Don’t talk like that, Gerald!” cried Aurora. “Don’t say anything so awful! Now keep still while I talk, listen while I tell you. You’re going on painting in your own way, but some one–see?–some one is going to arise bright enough to recognize how perfectly wonderful your pictures are. ”

“ I married Barton, but Barton wasn’t Jim’s real name. Aurora Hawthorne is what I called myself when we were young ones and played ladies, Hat and I. I came over here to cut loose from all the bothers that had made the last year in Denver a nightmare. I didn’t want to be connected with that dirty mess any more in anybody’s mind or my own. I wanted it to be like taking a bath and starting new, feeling clean. Then, if I was Aurora Hawthorne, Hattie had to be Estelle Madison, which was her name in our old play-days. ”

“ The Charmer had attained without need of him the setting she craved, and Gerald went on climbing his long stairs, painting in his so personal and unpopular way, and at night reading by light of a solitary lamp the choice and subtle masterpieces of many literatures.
“My land! shall we ever get to the top?” whispered Aurora to Estelle as, one behind the other, sliding their hands along the wall, they felt with their feet for the steps that led to Gerald’s door. “He told us they were long, and he warned us they were dark, but this!... I wonder why they don’t have a lamp going, or something.” ”

“ Whereupon Charlie changed his mind and after saying “Hello, Gerald!” turned again, and the young men stood looking over the scene side by side, two figures contrasting in reality nearly as much as they did in Charlie’s mental image of them for purposes of comparison.
Any Rosina who sold buttonhole bouquets at the theater door could have seen that Charlie was handsome, with his pale brown smoothness and regularity of feature; the pretty mustache accentuating and not concealing the neat and agreeable mold of his lip; the fine whiteness of his teeth, his civilized and silken look altogether. ”